No heterography here

Here, from Dr. Goodword, is a word about words.

heterography / he-têr-ah-grê-fi / noun

1. A nonphonetic or inconsistent spelling system: the use of the same letter to convey different sounds (as the C in city and candy) or different letters to express the same sound, as spelling the sound [s] C in city and S in sea.
2. An aberrant or unusual spelling, as m-i-l-c-h for milk or l-y-t-h-e for lithe.

Look out, here comes another big word. The good doctor:

The spelling system of a language is its orthography, Greek for "correct or true writing". The trueness of writing systems varies greatly and English orthography is dismally heterograpic, to use the adjective for heterography. Be sure to reassure your children, as they learn how to spell English words, that their difficulty is not their fault.

Heterographically speaking, in other words, English is a world leader. Many nations periodically introduce spelling reforms that update the spelling systems of their languages: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Netherlands, Portugal, and Brazil have been adjusting the spelling in their languages at the turn of the 21st century. English, however, is spoken by large populations in several different countries (Australia, Britain, Canada, India, New Zealand, the US, and South Africa), so agreement on any change is highly unlikely.

History: Heterography is a fairly recent combining of heteros "different, the other of two" + graph- "write" + ia, a noun suffix. The root graph- has a fascinating family history. The patriarch of this family is PIE *gerbh- "to scratch". In the Germanic languages it underwent metathesis, switching the position of the [e] and the [r], leading to English crab, a beast that can deliver an excellent scratch. As the rules of scratching were honed into languages, the same stem produced the stem of grammar.