This week I wrote about how the printing press triggered a panic over Latin loanwords in the 16th century. But the printing press did something else to English: it caused much of the chaos that haunts English spelling to this day.

All because it arrived just a little too early.

When printing arrived in England in 1476, it started to standardize spelling. The timing could not have been worse: English pronunciation was in the middle of a massive upheaval called the Great Vowel Shift, in which many vowels in the language changed how they were said.

The spelling froze, but the pronunciation kept moving.

If you've ever studied Spanish or Italian, you know that their vowel letters are pronounced consistently: A is ‘ah,’ E is ‘eh,’ I is ‘ee,’ O is ‘oh,’ and U is ‘oo.’

English vowels used to work the same way. “Bite” sounded like “beet.” “Beet” sounded like “bate,” and “bate” sounded like a lengthened version of “bat.”

The printing press froze the spelling as it was before this game of musical chairs began. If it had arrived just a generation later, English spelling would look completely different.