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A doubled consonant is nearly always used to indicate that the single vowel preceding it should be pronounced with a short sound; thus we distinguish the sounds of the following pairs: latter later; bitter biter; hopped, hoped; cutter cuter.
The doubled consonant is not necessary after a group of two vowels, because the pronunciation of two vowels (e.g., ai, ee, ou, etc.) is generally not affected by the letter or letters which follow them. (An exception generally occurs when they are followed by r.) We should therefore expect not to see many cases in English of a group of two vowels followed by doubled consonants. Let's check this assertion with the Regex Dictionary.
First we will use the following regex:
| Strings
| To match
| Filtered by
|
|
| Match words that include any two vowels followed by a doubled consonant.
| None
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The results show many examples in which the first of the two vowels "belongs" to a preceding g or q. That is, matches such as "guess" and "quill" aren't the kind of examples we're looking for. We can eliminate these words by putting a string in our filter:
| Strings
| To match
| Filtered by
|
|
| Match words that include any two vowels followed by a doubled consonant.
| Filter out words that include gu or qu
|
Adverbs that end in "2 vowels + lly" (e.g., individually, initially, etc.) are also not examples that interest us, so let's modify our filter again:
| Strings
| To match
| Filtered by
|
|
| Match words that include any two vowels followed by a doubled consonant.
| Filter out words that include gu or qu, or that end in lly.
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Finally, we'll filter out all the words that begin with the prefixes re and pre (e.g., reappear, prearrange).
| Strings
| To match
| Filtered by
|
|
| Match words that include any two vowels followed by a doubled consonant.
| Filter out words that begin with pre, de or re, that include gu or qu, or that end in lly.
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Nearly all the matches our regexes yield in this final search fall in the following groups, in which the consonants are not doubled for phonetic reasons:
- Words that begin with the prefixes anti, bi or semi (antiallergic, biannual, semiannual, etc.)
- Words that are obviously recent borrowings from other languages, especially French (serviette, chauffeur, surveillance, etc.)
- Another numerous group that consists of compound words or words with a suffix (coattail, pineapple, meanness, etc.)
- Words in which the s is doubled to indicate that it should be pronounced unvoiced (Aussie, gauss, Roussillon, etc.)
Finally, the only cases in which the consonant seems to be doubled for phonetic reasons are the words woollen and woolly-headed, British variants of woolen and wooly-headed.
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