I dream of an English that plays fair.
Not because the language is broken. Because the promise it makes to every child who opens a book—that the letters on the page will tell them what the word says—is a promise English has been breaking for a thousand years. And nobody has had the decency to tell the children.
This site exists because we noticed. We noticed that a Finnish seven-year-old reads with 95 percent accuracy, and an English seven-year-old reads with 34 percent accuracy, and the difference is not the children. We noticed that a Chinese child can count to 99 the week they learn the digits, while an English-speaking child must memorize eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, twenty, thirty, and fifty as separate words before they can even begin. We noticed that a sixth-grader in Beijing recites the multiplication table as a song—a four-beat rhythm locked into the language itself—while an English-speaking sixth-grader is still being corrected on the spelling of forty.
We noticed. And we decided to say something.
People will tell you that English is what it is. That you cannot redesign a language by committee. That the irregularities are charming, that the exceptions add texture, that the difficulty is the point. These are things people say when they have already paid the toll and want to believe the road was worth it. They are not arguments. They are coping mechanisms.
We are not here to cope. We are here to point at the destination.
I have a dream.
I have a dream that one day, an English-speaking seven-year-old will finish first grade reading as fluently as a Finnish seven-year-old—not because the teachers are better, not because the funding is higher, but because the spelling system finally makes the sounds it promises to make.
I have a dream that one day, through and though and tough and thought will each have their own distinct spelling—four words, four sound patterns, no ambushes. A child will look at a word and know what it says. That is not a radical demand. That is the definition of an alphabet.
I have a dream that one day, the number words from one to one hundred will be as regular as the numbers themselves. Eleven will be oneteen. Twelve will be twoteen. Every child will count to 99 the day they learn 10. And the multiplication table—twenty-one, forty-two, sixty-three—will become what it was always meant to be: a nursery rhyme, not a math test.
I have a dream that one day, all verbs will take -ed for the past tense. Two hundred irregular holdouts will finally be retired, and every learner—native or foreign, five years old or fifty—will be able to form the past tense of any verb in the language without looking it up. No child will be corrected for saying goed or thinked or bringed, because those will be the correct forms, and the old ones will be in a museum where they belong.
I have a dream that one day, the global burden of learning English—the billions of hours spent annually by non-native speakers drilling irregular verbs, memorizing inconsistent spellings, decoding pronunciation from letters that do not map to sounds—will be lifted. Not because English has been defeated, but because English has been reformed. The most widely spoken language on Earth should not also be the most difficult to learn. That is not a feature. That is a design failure.
I have a dream that one day, a student in Shanghai and a student in London will exchange essays written in English, and the number of spelling errors in both papers will be approximately the same. The Chinese student will not have had to work three times as hard. The British student will not have had the rules changed on them four times before the age of ten. Both of them will have learned a system. A system that makes sense.
I have a dream that one day, every word we retire will not be erased. It will be archived. Catalogued. Given a card in a library that reads: we used to say it this way. Then we found something better. The old words will be honored for what they were—stepping stones, not anchors. Our archive of retired words will be the quietest room in the language, and the most honest. Nothing is deleted. Everything is explained.
This is the vision. Not a smaller language, but a clearer one. Not poorer, but fairer. Not simplified for the sake of laziness, but regularized for the sake of the youngest, the newest, and the least privileged learners—who are the ones who pay the highest tax on every irregularity English refuses to give up.
We are not a committee. We have no authority. We cannot change the language by decree. We do not need to. The language will change when enough people stop treating its scars as heritage and start treating them as what they are: an unpaid debt, passed from one generation of children to the next, with interest.
We are here to say: we noticed.
And that is enough to begin.