Chapter 7

Major lexical categories and graphemic weight

English spelling has a very interesting regularity: there exists a minimum word length for lexical words. Words of this class have to be at least three letters long, even if they consist of only two phonemes and could be spelled with two letters (e.g., ebb/*eb, egg/*eg). This regularity does not hold for function words (e.g., a, I, be, he, it, etc.). This means that an important distinction between words (lexical vs. functional) is mirrored in the writing system. In a study of Early Modern English texts, I demonstrate that this regularity evolved gradually over the course of 200 years. This is a case of self-organization in spelling: without explicit guidance or regulation, the pattern emerged in usage. The proposed function of having separate constraints for the length of lexical words and function words is a reading aid.