IN William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius asks Hamlet, “What do you read my lord?” Hamlet replies: “Words, words, words.”

That is exactly what students of the junior and secondary SIR challenge have been doing since April this year. Dictionaries have suddenly become the be-all and end-all in many schools, homes, cafes, malls and even playgrounds.

Children have learned words they never knew or understood before, and I’m sure in the process they would have noticed how strange English is. For one thing, it has a lot of strange rules, especially for spelling. But what’s worse is, it has even more strange exceptions!

Take, for instance, silent letters. These are letters that sneak into words at the beginning, middle or end where you least expect them. Many students, especially the younger ones, missed out letters in simple words like the “k” in “knife”, the “gh” in “night”, or the “b” in “comb”.

In fact, about 60 per cent of words in English have silent letters in them. This can be really hard when you’re learning to spell, as I’m sure many students have realised.
How did this happen? It’s all because of the mixed-up history of the English language. Celtic, German, Latin, Norse and French speakers each had their own language, alphabet and system of spelling. Over the years, the way people spoke English changed even though the spelling didn’t. To complicate it more, pronunciation went all over the place, letters appeared and disappeared as people wrote them down differently, and it all got more confusing!

Thanks to the invention of printing, the idea of standard spelling and how a word should be written led to the beginnings of English dictionaries. The most famous and fascinating was that of Dr. Samuel Johnson, published in 1755. He read thousands of books, letters, poems and more to find what he thought was the best spelling and meaning for a word.

So, students, the next time you open the dictionary, you’ll understand words more. It may be that the word is spelled how it was pronounced hundreds of years ago, or according to a fashion, or just by mistake or confusion, or because somebody liked it like that.

But all of these amazing spellings have been preserved, even frozen in the language — and you students have to spell it like the dictionary: Spell it write! (Or is it “right”? This is another confusion — when words are pronounced the same way but spelt differently. These are called “homophones”. It is therefore absolutely crucial for students to listen to the meaning of the word and how it is used in a sentence to spell it right.)

All this confusion of silent letters, homophones, strange spelling (double letters, plurals and such) make listening to a word and spelling it out a Herculean task. I would like to give credit to those bravehearts who participated in the challenge — “boats against currents they sailed on” — and emerged champions. Congratulations!

I hope the dictionaries will stay off the shelves and open, and the competition keeps motivating students to explore the World of Words. In parting, may I quote Ben Jonson in Volpone: “Give ‘em words!”

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Jagdish Bhain is a retired English teacher and NIE facilitator. She was a presenter at SIR state competitions in Kedah, Penang, Negri Sembilan, Terengganu and Perlis.