Spelling: doubling rules for consonants

Vowel charts from edublogs

To decide whether to double a consonant when adding a suffix means you need to know another basic pronunciation principle:

The presence of a silent e at the end of a one-syllable word indicates that the earlier vowel is pronounced long; in other words, it says the sound of its own name. Conversely, the absence of this final silent e means the vowel is pronounced short.

This works for a,e,i,o and u,* as illustrated by the following examples:

Short a in mat rhymes with cat; long a in mate mate rhymes with 8.
We double the consonant after the short vowel, so matting has the same short vowel sound as the original word mat, and mating retains the same long vowel sound as mate.

Short e in pet means we preserve this original vowel sound by doubling the final consonant when we add the suffix. The new word is spelled petting. But meting (from mete) has no double consonant.

In the same way, sit becomes sitting and site becomes siting;
hop becomes hopped or hopping and hope becomes hoped or hoping; run becomes running and tune becomes tuning.


*Note: The letter y represents a vowel in some words, but it sounds the same as i (fly) or e (softly). In words like yet or yellow, y has a consonant sound.