orthography

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The Word of the Day for January 4 is:

orthography   \or-THAH-gruh-fee\   noun

     1 *a : the art of writing words with the proper letters according to 
standard usage  b : the representation of the sounds of a language by written 
or printed symbols
     2 : a part of language study that deals with letters and spelling

Example sentence:
     English orthography was not yet regularized in medieval times, so words 
often had many different spellings.

Did you know?
     "It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word!" 
That quote, ascribed to Andrew Jackson, might have been the motto of early 
English spelling. The concept of orthography (a term that derives from the 
Greek words "orthos," meaning "right or true," and "graphein," meaning "to 
write") was not something that really concerned people until the introduction 
of the printing press in England in the second half of the 15th century. From 
then on, English spelling became progressively more uniform and has remained 
fairly stable since the 1755 publication of Samuel Johnson's _Dictionary of the 
English Language_ (with the notable exception of certain spelling reforms, such 
as changing "musick" to "music," that were championed by Noah Webster).

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.