There are many words in English that differ by only one letter, and when it’s the same letter repeated, it’s easy to get confused. However, English pronunciation comes to the rescue to help with English spelling rules, and there’s an easy way to tell the difference between words that have a single letter and words that have a doubled letter: the sound of the vowel. Learning the pronunciation of a word helps you know which to use to get the word you want.
Take a look at these word pairs and their pronunciations:
scraping / scrapping
(SKRAY-ping / SKRAH-ping)waging / wagging
(WAY-jing / WAH-ging)hoping / hopping
(HOH-ping / HAW-ping)doting / dotting
(DOH-ting / DAW-ting)diner / dinner
(DAI-nuhr / DIH-nuhr)caped / capped
(KAYPT / KAHPT)
In each of the pairs, the first word is pronounced with a “long” vowel sound in the first syllable – that is, it has the sound of the letter itself: a = AY, i = AI, o = OH.
In the second words of each pair, the doubled consonant has changed the vowel from a “long” vowel sound to a “short” vowel sound: a = AH, i = IH, o = AW.
Note: In today’s post we focused on single and double consonants, but there are also ways to use pronunciation to help with doubled vowels. We’ll look at those in another post.
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