Sure, English spelling is undeniably wacky. But it’s not as lawless as people claim. This is an article from 2000 that discusses the often subtle (but logical!) rules that govern (most of) English spelling, and explains once and for all why “ghoti” can’t actually be pronounced “fish.”

Whenever the subject comes up, someone is sure to bring up all the words in -ough, or George Bernard Shaw's ghoti-- a word which illustrates only Shaw's wiseacre ignorance. English spelling may be a nightmare, but it does have rules, and by those rules, ghoti can only be pronounced like goatee.

The purpose of this page is to describe those rules-- to explain the system behind English spelling, the rules that tell you how to pronounce a written word correctly over 85% of the time.