ABSTRACT
Unlike Italian and Spanish, English has irregular orthography; that is, there is an inconsistent relationship between spelling and sound. For example, the letter sequence OUCH is pronounced very differently in cough, bough, and enough; and there are two different ways of pronouncing AVE as in have and wave. There are, however, some regularities in English orthography in that, for many letter sequences, one pronunciation is more common than any other. Words that contain only letter sequences (graphemes) with the common pronunciation are called regular words whereas words that contain at least one less common pronunciation are known as irregular. Almost all words are regular in languages like Italian and Spanish with consistent orthography.
