Spelling

Fully phonemic orthography is usually only approximated, due to factors including changes in pronunciation over time, and the borrowing of vocabulary from other languages without adapting its spelling.

In countries or regions where there is an authoritative language academy, such as France, the Netherlands, and the German-speaking areas, reforms have occasionally been introduced (not always successfully) so that spelling better matches the changing pronunciation.

Divergent spelling is a popular advertising technique, used to attract attention or to render a trademark "suggestive" rather than "merely descriptive", or to evade copyright restrictions.

Misspellings of the latter type are called "atomic typos", and they can easily make their way into printed material because they are not caught by simple computer spell checkers.

[14] This is mainly due to large number of words that were borrowed from other languages with no successful attempts of complete spelling reform.

[15] Most spelling rules usually do not reflect phonetic changes that have taken place since the end of the 15th century (for example, the Great Vowel Shift).

[20] Beginning from the 17th century, various options for orthographic reforms were suggested that would create a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and phoneme, but all of them were rejected.

Most modern proposals to reform spelling are limited to the removal of homophone letters that are preserved for etymological reasons.