Humans couldn't be satisfied with spelling out only things they say. They also needed to spell out the sounds around them. Giving a name to a sound is called "onomatopoeia." The word is difficult to ...

Psychologist Greg Simpson was studying Korean with the help of a graduate student, a Korean native, when a thought struck him. “You don’t have spelling bees, do you?” he asked her. He had to explain ...

My 11-year-old student sighs. How can the same letters make so many different sounds? We are looking at the letter combination “ough”, which can be read in seven different ways: “through”, “thorough”, ...