A word ends with a consonant, a short vowel, and a consonant. I want to add -er, -ed or -ing as a suffix. Do I double the last consonant? It seems logical to do so, so as not to turn the short vowel into a long one.
Bat becomes batted, not bated. Gel becomes gelling, not geling. Makes sense. But every now and then spell check corrects me on this. I think it wanted to change travelled to traveled.
Is there a rule for this?
Yes: the general rule for two-syllable words like “travel” is that there are two rules: the American way is one letter, and the British way is two letters.
Thank Noah Webster for that. In US spelling, many of the words that would normally be doubled are not. e.g. traveled/traveler, canceled, worshiped. They look wrong to me and Firefox flags them as wrong also. That’s because I have the UK spelling selected.
However, the double-consonant spellings are not uncommon in America, either.
It’s two-syllable words only? Shipped and Worshiped? Huh. What about words with more than two syllables?
I thought stressed syllables have the consonant doubled in American spelling, like ‘rappelled’.
I’m gonna take it that you’re using Microsoft Word. I remind you that it was devised by Microsoft software engineers, by which I mean evil monkeys.
Travel becomes travelled in the past tense. Anything Redmond says to the contrary is a sick lie.
That may well be the rule.
No – the evil monkey was Noah Webster, with his dictionary. The people in Redmond are just copying his evil ways.
Don’t bother me with facts. I have decided to blame the Gates-beast for this and blame it I shall.
My hard copy AHD says it can be both ways, but lists the single “l” first. I use IE8, but my spellchecker is by a third party and it also vomits when in your quote above you use 2 "ll"s.
This is the rule, although travel is an exception to the rule, in BE, and there may be others.
Also, it’s not about vowels and consonants. It’s about vowel letters and consonant letters: bat => batter // bait => baiter
Each word has only one vowel, but bait has two vowel letters.
Primary school stuff: The vowel at the end is able to reach past one letter and poke the previous vowel changing the noise it makes so you need to put another letter in to block it so it can’t reach past. Of course there are exceptions.
Bater - the “e” can reach back, poke the “a” and make it say Ay!
Batter - aha, it can’t reach.
That’s the rule I was going by. I guess good old Noah steps in and blocks the reach-around.
A million evil monkeys, with a million evil word processors…