"The Chaos" is a poem which demonstrates the irregularity of English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 spelling and pronunciation, written by Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 writer, traveller and teacher Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946), also known under the pseudonym Charivarius. It includes about 800 examples of irregular pronunciation, and first appeared in an appendix to the author's 1920 textbook Drop Your Foreign Accent: engelsche uitspraakoefeningen . It has appeared in various versions: the author's first version had 146 lines but "the most complete and authoritative version ever likely to emerge", published by The Spelling Society in 1992-93, has 274 lines.

To demonstrate the flavour of the poem, the opening lines are:

Dearest creature in creation

Studying English pronunciation,

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

and the closing lines are:

Finally, which rhymes with enough,

Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough??

Hiccough has the sound of cup...

My advice is: GIVE IT UP!

These lines are set out as in the author's version, with alternate couplets indented and the problematic words italicised.

External links

• The Classic Concordance of Cacographic Chaos, Introduced by Chris Upward Text of 274-line version of the poem, with introduction, at The Spelling Society website
• Text with IPA transcription of first 15 verses in British and American English, by David Madore