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Article In: Writing/Reading Interface
Edited by Terry Joyce and Constanze Weth
[Written Language & Literacy 28:1] 2025
► pp. 11–43

Frequency-dependent selection in the English spelling system across 1000 years of history

ORCiD logo with link | University of London
ORCiD logo with link | University of London
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
English orthography has largely been left to evolve freely across its thousand-year history with little top-down design or reform. Yet modern English spelling has become standardized, even if its standardized spellings are sometimes internally inconsistent. The relative freedom with which English orthography has been allowed to evolve makes it an interesting test-case for exploring whether spelling standardization might arise through a process of positive frequency-dependent selection: To maximize the chance of being understood, it pays for a writer to adopt spelling variants that occur with higher frequency, leading to those forms becoming increasingly entrenched. To evaluate this possibility, we assembled a diachronic dataset of English spelling variation, SpellEng, which we make freely available. SpellEng reports on the frequency of 112,080 spelling variants (across 32,264 lemmata) over the entire history of written English. We use this dataset along with a model of frequency-dependent selection to estimate the extent to which English spelling standardization can be explained by such a process. Our findings suggest that the past 1000 years of English spelling have been characterized by both positive and negative frequency-dependent selection. We discuss how linguistic dynamics and external events have shaped these periods of stability and change.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.SpellEng: A diachronic dataset of English spelling variants
    • 2.1Preparation of the corpus
    • 2.2Selection of the lemmata (Step 1)
    • 2.3Extraction of the OED data (Step 2)
    • 2.4Calculating the frequency of spelling variants (Step 3)
    • 2.5Structure of the dataset
    • 2.6Validation of the dataset
    • 2.7General properties of the dataset
  • 3.Modeling frequency-dependent selection in English spelling
    • 3.1Model
    • 3.2Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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