5 Checking Your Spelling ESTABLISHING THE GROUND RULES Creating words Forming plurals To form a plural word an ‘s’ is usually added to a noun . But there are some exceptions. (a) Christian, chronic, school, scream, splash, through. (b) add, baggage, commander, flap, grab, occasion. 53 There are twenty-six letters in our alphabet. Five are vowels and the rest are consonants. The vowels are A, E, I, O, U. All words have to contain at least one vowel. (‘Y’ is considered to be a vowel in words like ‘rhythm’ and ‘psychology’). Consonants are all the other letters that are not vowels. So that a word can be pronounced easily, vowels are placed between consonants. No more than three con- sonants can be placed together. Below are two lists. The first contains words with three consecutive consonants and in the second are words with two consecutive consonants. The sets of consonants are separated by vowels: English spelling is not easy to learn. There are some rules but often there are many exceptions to the rule. Some spell- ings and pronunciation appear to be illogical. It is therefore important that certain spellings are learnt .