Editing English orthography (section)

== Phonic irregularities ==
{{See also|English spelling reform}}

Partly because English has never had any official regulating authority for spelling, such as the Spanish {{lang|es|[[Real Academia Española]]}}, the French {{lang|fr|[[Académie française]]}}, the German ''[[Council for German Orthography]]'', the Danish ''[[Dansk Sprognævn|Sprognævn]]'', and the Thai [[Royal Society of Thailand|Royal Society]], English spelling is considered irregular and complex compared to that of other languages. Although French, Danish, and Thai, among other languages, present a similar degree of difficulty when ''encoding'' (writing), English is more difficult when ''decoding'' (reading), as there are clearly many more possible pronunciations of a group of letters. For example, in French, {{IPA|/u/}} (as in "true", but short), can be spelled {{vr|ou, ous, out, oux}} (''ou'', ''nous'', ''tout'', ''choux''), but the pronunciation of each of those sequences is always the same. However, in English, while {{IPA|/uː/}} can be spelled in up to 24 different ways, including {{vr|oo, u, ui, ue, o, oe, ou, ough}} (''spook'', ''truth'', ''suit'', ''blues'', ''to'', ''shoe'', ''group'', ''through'') (see [[#Sound-to-spelling correspondences|Sound-to-spelling correspondences]] below), all of these spellings have other pronunciations as well (e.g., ''foot'', ''us'', ''build'', ''bluest'', ''so'', ''toe'', ''grout'', ''plough'', ''sew'') Thus, in unfamiliar words and [[proper nouns]], the pronunciation of some sequences, [[Ough (orthography)|{{vr|ough}}]] being the prime example, is unpredictable even for educated native speakers.