Learning to spell can increase students’ reading proficiency, Masterson noted. She and her colleagues developed software to analyze how students spell and methods to help them learn better.

In part, that’s because the English language presents some messy realities. Many of these high-frequency words are phonetically irregular; they don’t follow normal sound-spelling patterns.

First, the good news: it is now possible to develop programs, illustrations, or extract AI output with plain-spoken English prompting, versus the need to write code in Python, R, or SQL. Now, the ...