"Hiccough" is spelt "hiccup" by nearly everyone nowadays. In comic books, "though" is often spelt "tho", and "through" spelt "thru". The US and UK should get together and create a small language spelling reform group to suggest more such changes to the 20% of words that cause 80% of the problems, e.g. changing "thorough" to "thuruh", "rough" to "ruff", and "cough" to "coff".

It's happening by default anyway. Schools now encourage "inventive spelling" rather than correct spelling, so you have kids in 8th grade who can't spell basic words correctly but rather they write them how they sound.

For a historical anecdote, this sort of simplified phonetic spelling was championed in the early 1900s by Andrew Carnegie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

Moon Joon? bedrum?

And don't forget words that are pronounced differently with identical spelling, for added hilarity:

* Polish people live in Poland.

* Polish your boots.

Obligatory link to Nolst Trenité's "The Chaos": http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

New to me, thanks for sharing.

Some great examples there, such as "minute" and "minute". heh.

'Feoffer' is probably the worst word there. But just maybe the worst snare in English is 'positive' — the other 'positive' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_organ . Yes it's obviously some kind of loan-word, but then so are most English words...

Another example:

* I read this book whenever I feel lonely.

* I read this book many years ago

A friend of mine coming from Scotland once told me that he phoned Twinings (the English tea maker) in order to understand how to pronounce it ("twain..." or "twin...").

So, don't make us go to sleep without knowing how to actually pronounce Twinings! I have no idea and now want to know.

Twine-ings. As in twine/string. Rhymes with wine. The 'ings' is pretty standard, like in 'things'.

Twinings is a name, though - and all bets are off when it comes to name pronunciation.

"Polish Remover"

A bottle of solvent or leader of the Nazi party?

That's just etymological spelling reflecting an old pronunciation. Whether such spelling is "broken" is purely a matter of opinion.

There's no phonetics there; just orthography.