They all come from other languages and they have two valid spelling versions:
- one with special characters coming from the original language,
- and another version with characters adjusted to the English alphabet.
Test yourself:
Do you know any “imported” English words that contain the letters below?
ö
ï
å
ñ
é
KEY:
The most common example is the kind of small restaurant selling light meals and drinks, with its 2 spelling versions:
café and cafe.
Did you know that smorgasbord also has two official English spelling versions in dictionaries? So, you can use the original Swedish spelling, too: smörgåsbord.
Piñata (an object in the shape of an animal, etc. that contains sweets) has a ‘more English’ version, ‘pinata’, but the original Spanish spelling is preferred.
And the word ‘naive’ also has another official spelling, with a weird ‘i’: naïve.
Now, you are one step closer to a million dollars if you face this question in a quiz show 🙂
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