Spelling Rules: The Floss Rule

Robin

says: Customer Service

Meghan,
I love that your daughter is really thinking of the why of things! I did some digging, and found a few things.

First, the doubling of these letters did not start as a rule. Rather, the rule was applied centuries later when the spellings were already established, when people noticed this pattern already existed. Put another way, people didn’t decide to have this rule and started doubling these letters. Rather, they were doubling these letters for hundreds of years before this rule was put into words. It was something English writers were doing intuitively even before spelling was standardized.

It seems that the practice for doubling these particular letters came about separately for each letter. It is thought that S was doubled to show that it was not a plural -S suffix being added so that class is not more than one cla as it would look like if we spelled it clas.

For F, way back in history, lowercase f and certain s letters looked REALLY similar. Specifically, English had a “long s” and a “round s” and had rules for when each was used (this was used in both handwriting and for a couple of centuries after the printing press became commonplace). Well, the long s was hard to distinguish from lowercase f, so it is thought that doubling f at the end of words was to make the f clearer. (By the way, this reasoning for double f is less agreed upon than the reasoning for double s, but I could find no other reason for double f.) Anyway, here is a Wikipedia article on Long S that includes examples of what the letter looked like, including the original US Bill of Rights that used the long s in the word Congress right on top, so it looks like Congrefs to modern eyes!

The best I could find for double L was, “Most final doublings of this kind serve a specific purchase. There does not seem to be such a justification for -LL, however.” So, apparently, even scholars of historic English can’t find a reason for doubling L, but it is done with such regularity that it is a very reliable rule.

By the way, the resource book The ABC’s and All Their Tricks by Margaret M. Bishop was very helpful for this question, as well as many others about English spelling.

I hope this helps alleviate your daughter’s curiosity some! Great question! I love digging into such things.

Meghan

says:

October 13, 2023 at 3:48 pm

THANK YOU so much!! I am going to share this with her. She is always asking me about the whys of English spelling and I can never answer her beyond saying that English has been influenced by a lot of other languages, because that’s all that my Googling has turned up. She HATES it that there are so many exceptions to various spelling rules. I shared what you wrote in an earlier comment, about the reasons behind the exceptions to the floss rule, and that was really helpful for her. I am going to see if my library has that book you recommended ☺️.

Robin

says: Customer Service

October 13, 2023 at 6:15 pm

You’re welcome, Meghan!

If you can’t find The ABCs and All Their Tricks at your library, see if you can pick it up used. I find it to be a helpful reference book.

And, if your daughter has more questions, just ask! We’re happy to answer the best we can, and at least I enjoy such questions (I’m pretty sure my coworkers do too)! You can ask here, or email us at support@allaboutlearningpress.com.