We have words with 2 consecutive letters like book, deep, wall, etc. Why aren’t there words with 3 consecutive letters, let’s say boook, deeep, etc. Why is 2 the maximum?
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There are…”cross-section” is an example. But all “real” words that do this include a hyphen to break the triple up, basically because it’s easier on the brain.
It is a false premise. Below it two example of two words in merriam-webster with 3 consecutive letters
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hmmm](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hmmm)
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riot%20grrrl](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/riot%20grrrl)
There are more like BRRR, shhh, mmm that are valid in Scrabble. They was not in merriam-webster
Depending on your use of hyphens, there are a couple of English words that can have triple letters, like “cross-section”.
But the simple answer is that English has no sounds that require a triple letter to represent, except when we’re trying to indicate holding a vowel for a long time (as in “ahhhhhhh”, which just indicates the length of the _a_). So we have no reason to spell anything that way.
The reason we have *doubled* letters is that Old English used them to indicate two things:
* A change in the quality of a vowel, as in “met” vs “meet” or “gal” vs “gall”.
* A geminate consonant that is actually pronounced twice, as the ‘d’ in modern English *midday* or the ‘s’ in *misspell*. Modern English has very few surviving geminate consonants, almost always in compound words, but Old English had more.
I suppose by literacy rules that’s true but personally unless it’s important or something fuuuck it. You csn also hear extra letters when people speak. Like “maaan I had a crazy night the other night.”
Just as an example. But as for the legitimate answer.. Probably just because you can still make sense of said words with just 2 and plus.. Syminatry perhaps?
As a german I love to throw out my favorite german word for that occasion: “Teeei”. Yes, that’s a real, formal word. It means “tea egg”, ie: the reusable container you use to put loose tea leaves into hot water.
But as crazy as german is with certain words, even we often write it as Tee-Ei, to be easier to parse mentally.
There’s some discussion to be found online if you google the word “freeest”. Dictionaries seem to only like the two-e spelling, but if I ever have cause to write the word, I would use the three-e spelling, being logically correct, phonetically correct, and just more fun.
There’s only so many sounds a person can reasonably make and we already have enough symbols and other symbol combinations to be covered. Between those two things it’s very easy to avoid three letters in a row and I would imagine convention was to avoid that for readability. How would you pronounce those words? There’s probably a more efficient way to spell them.
Because three letters doesn’t really convey any more information than two (and even the second is often redundant). For a word to be spelled with three copies of the same letter, people would need to consistently write it that way, which means there would need to be some benefit to doing it over just doing two. There never has been.
A “word” is spoken. What’s written is a representation of the word. English is pretty notorious for having the most confusing and irrational connection between it’s written and spoken forms. Though I thought the bough fell into the slough, it was too tough. But it did make me cough….
In many languages, the spoken length of vowels and consonants is “phonemic”. In other words, a long vowel or consonant changes the meaning if that letter is a short vowel. Anyone who is a fan of hockey will have heard multiple Finnish names, and seen the odd spelling. That’s a big part of the reason. Estonian, which is much like Finnish, has single , double, and triple length vowels and consonants, where the meaning is different for each length.
In English, length is, almost entirely, not phonemic. In some dialects, it is. Consider a very proper Englishman telling somebody “I’d love to but I can’t.” Focus on how that Englishman would pronounce the word “can’t”. Then think of what the word would mean if the vowel sound was shorter.
Somebody gave the example of “freeest”, which would usually be spelled “free-est”. While it is written with three e’s, that isn’t how it is spoken: it’s “free-yust”. Other words that rhyme with it are spelled differently: theist, or beist (a dialectal conjugation of to be heard in northern England).
All that is a long way of saying that, as double-length is not phonemic, neither is triple length, so there is no need to spell something that doesn’t exist in the actual language as it is spoken.
One note: be and bee are pronounced the same. The extra “e” is added to the noun to identify the meaning that is absent in the word as pronounced. The context is what shows the meaning in the spoken form.
Another note: fed and feed have different vowel sounds. The double letter doesn’t indicate double length to distinguish meaning, it points the way to a different vowel sound.
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