The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules (33 page)

Spelling rule #2: The ending
efy
is used with only three words and their derivatives:

Until quite recently,
liquify
and
rarify
were spelled with an
e
. Three
efy
words come from Latin roots that contain the letter
e
:
liquere, putrere,
and
stupere
, but
rarify
comes from
rarus
, which does not contain an
e
. The modern spelling is therefore correct. In time the other words will follow suit and exchange the
e
for an
i
.

Naturally, there are many other words that end in
fy
but do not contain this
ify
suffix. They often have the long
e
sound, but there are other vowel sounds, too:

C
HAPTER 33

Using
cede, sede, ceed, seed

A
lthough there is only a small handful of commonly used English words that use one of these endings, despite their small numbers, they can cause a great deal of irritation. This takes a little explanation.
Supersede
comes from the Latin
sedere
, meaning
“to sit,”
whereas most of the other words come from
ceder, “to go ahead.”
Unfortunately, over the centuries, the spelling has gotten slightly mixed so that we now have some words spelled with
ee.

Spelling rule #1: The spelling
seed
is only used for
seed,
including its compounds and derivatives:

Spelling rule #2: Almost all the other words use
cede
(from
ceder
):

Spelling rule #3: There are two other possible endings,
eed
and
ede
:

Note that
supersede
is the only commonly used word in the English language to use
sede.

When the long
e
sound is changed to a short
e
sound, it will be spelled with only one
e
—
succeed, success, intercede, intercession.
One curiosity is
proceed
, which loses the double
e
when it becomes
procedure
but retains the long
e
sound.

The word
emceed
is the past tense of
emcee
, which is formed from an acronym (
MC, Master of Ceremonies
) and is so new that some writers prefer not to use it.

C
HAPTER 34

Using
er, or, ar, re, our

T
hese five endings should pose no problem. This is because we use only three of them. Two hundred years ago, Noah Webster eliminated both the
re
and the
our
from American English and simplified the whole matter. The British still cling to numerous words spelled with the imitation French
our
ending—
colour, labour, honour, neighbour
. In the U.S. we have only a handful—compare
hour, four, tour
.

The
re
ending also illustrates a difference between British and American spelling. On the other side of the Atlantic, they spell about three dozen words with the
r
before the
e
—
millimetre, centre, theatre,
etc.. In the U.S., we have reduced it to fewer than half a dozen commonly used words that are spelled with the
re
only so that they will conform to the soft and hard
c
and
g
rules:

Spelling rule #1: The
er
ending is used for occupations or for persons who carry out an action:

Spelling rule #2: The
or
ending is used with root words that end in
t
or
s
:

During the 18th century, there was a period when French spellings were fashionable and a number of words were spelled with either
or
or
our
: