Unlike the IPA, where there can only be one version per pronunciation, as there must be an unambiguous one-to-one correspondence, there can be many respellings: if *disāsterous for disāstrous is a common mistake, we can also represent the pronunciation as *dizāstrus or *dizāstrous or *dizāstrəss (with 'ə', a special character – the only one used – for schwa) or we can contrast British English *dizàstrus with American *dizástrus. (Another way of showing new stress is with a bar: Tchaî| kóvsky.) A sentence from the preceding paragraph can thus be rewritten as follows: 'An example of a common misspelling is *disāsterous for disāstrous, retaining the E of disāster.' Respelling may be used to exemplify an incorrect spelling, or show a correct pronunciation, or a bit of both. Where there is more than one accent, the first is stressed, and the same is true after a hyphen, so in the respelling of Tchaikóvsky, *Chŷ-kóffskỳ, it is 'kóff' that has the main stress. A table of these accents (which are not part of the language ) can be found below there is also an IPA key at English phonemes. The accent marks show pronunciation, thús. In some cases incorrect respellings are placed next to the correct ones, signalled by a preceding asterisk, like thís *thíss. To show pronunciation, these articles use correct spellings with added accent marks, instead of relying on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The above grid (reproduced and explained below) provides links to three lists and a cluster of articles devoted to these things. Many words do not turn out to have the pronunciation they appear to have: 'do' and 'to' do not rhyme with 'go' and 'no', while 'seismic', instead of being 'seezmic' or 'sayzmic', or even 'sayizmic', is in fact 'size-mic'. An example of a common misspelling is 'disasterous' for 'disastrous', retaining the 'e' of 'disaster'.

This can be seen at its most extravagant in the field of proper nouns-for example, simply adding an 'h' to 'Maria' to make it rhyme with 'pariah', or calling oneself 'Cholmondeley Featherstonehaugh' while pronouncing it 'Chumley Fanshaw'. English is notorious for its many varied, inconsistent and irregular spellings.

Words with alphabetical spellings