Pronouncing Orthography was an English spelling reform first published in 1864 by Edwin Leigh as a way to help children learn to read more quickly and easily. It aimed to improve literacy education by eliminating the irregularities of conventional English orthography and adhering to the alphabetic principle, wherein every letter represented a specific sound. This allowed children to read words by combining elementary sounds using phonics.
The principal objective of Leigh's phonetic orthography was to enable children to correctly convert written words to speech regardless of whether the child was pre-acquainted with a particular word or not. In contrast, standard English orthography's myriad rules and exceptions made this difficult.
Leigh wanted to avoid prejudice similar to that encountered against the English Phonotypic Alphabet by making his new orthography familiar to standard English orthography, so the Latin alphabet and spelling conventions were fully retained. Leigh balanced phonetic precision with grapheme regularity by making silent letters in words faint, so that the original forms of words were roughly maintained. Leigh also subtly embellished letters with multiple modified forms, so children were explicitly aware of the possible sounds made by the "common letters", while maintaining harmony with English orthography.
Leigh utilised the pronouncing dictionaries of John Walker and Benjamin Humphrey Smart, two of the leading orthoepists of the time, to ensure his orthography resulted in correct pronunciation.
Leigh separated learning to read from learning to write; he described his position in his report to the Boston school committee (one of the cities which trialled Leigh's methods):
In a letter to Leigh, Lewis Soldan, a St. Louis educator, suggested children should learn to read using his orthography and then transition to standard English orthography, where they would learn to write.
Leigh considered the sequence in which Pronouncing Orthography could be taught when he segmented letter sounds into four utterance categories:
He suggested avoiding teaching category IV sounds using Pronouncing Orthography and instead waiting until the child has transitioned to conventional orthography, whilst the other categories are taught in sequence.
Leigh converted existing basal reading schemes to Pronouncing Orthography for expediency. He was agnostic about which methods teachers used for teaching literacy, as he presumed the benefits of phonetic understanding would be secured by using his orthography in combination with whatever was determined the best available methods. In reality, Leigh's orthography did not lend itself to writing because of the asymmetrical application of the alphabetical principle. So every letter (grapheme) equated to a single sound (phoneme), allowing children to read with absolute certainty, but every sound (phoneme) equated to a multitude of possible letters (graphemes), meaning children would not know with certainty how to write an unfamiliar word. This was necessary to keep words written in Pronouncing Orthography resembling those in conventional English orthography.
At the Vienna Exposition of 1873, Leigh was awarded the Medal of Progress as a recognition of merit for his invention of Pronouncing Orthography.