English orthography

English orthography is the orthography used in writing the English language, including English spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Like the orthographic systems of most world languages, it has a broad degree of standardization. However, unlike most languages, English provides more than one way to spell nearly every phoneme, and most letters and letter-combinations can stand for different pronunciations depending on context and meaning. This is largely due to the complex history of the English language together with the absence of systematic spelling reforms. In general, modern English spelling, much of which was devised originally for the phonetic spelling of Middle English, does not reflect the sound changes that have occurred since the late fifteenth century (such as the Great Vowel Shift). There are some variations in English orthography by global regions, some of which resulted from spelling reform efforts that succeeded only partially and only in certain regions.