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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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.
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