question: Why is “another” an acceptable spelling of “an other”, but “alot” is frowned upon?
comment: Another and “an other” don’t mean exactly the same thing though. “Can I have another piece of cake” implies one more piece of the same cake, because you liked the first piece. “Can I have an other piece of cake” implies you want a piece of a different cake or, you want to trade the piece you have for a different one, because you’re dissatisfied with the one you have.
passages: Interspel
  
  Interspel (from "International English Spelling") is a set of principles introduced by Valerie Yule to meet the challenge of how to remove unpredictability and inconsistency from present English spelling, while keeping the present heritage of print through minimal change in its appearance.
  
  The advantages of present spelling are maximized for users and learners by applying psychological research on their needs and abilities, facilitating both visual and auditory reading processes, and by taking account of the special features of the English language. This also promotes visible relationships of English and international vocabulary. 
   Some reform proposals try to make too many spelling changes at once and do not allow for any transitional period where the old spellings and the new may be in use together. The problem is an overlap in words, where a particular word could be an unreformed spelling of one word or a reformed spelling of another, akin to false friends when learning a foreign language.
   BULLET::::- "any more" or "anymore": In sense "any longer", the single-word form is usual in North America and Australia but unusual elsewhere, at least in formal writing. Other senses always have the two-word form; thus Americans distinguish "I couldn't love you anymore [so I left you]" from "I couldn't love you any more [than I already do]". In Hong Kong English, "any more" is always two words.
   Section::::History.:20th century onward.
   In 2013, University of Oxford Professor of English Simon Horobin proposed that variety in spelling be acceptable. For example, he believes that it does not matter whether words such as "accommodate" and "tomorrow" are spelled with double letters. Note that this proposal does not fit within the definition of spelling reform used by, for example, Random House Dictionary.
  
  Section::::Arguments for reform.
   Read gives a number of subsequent appearances in print. Seven instances were accompanied with glosses that were variations on "all correct" such as "oll korrect" or "ole kurreck", but five appeared with no accompanying explanation, suggesting that the word was expected to be well known to readers and possibly in common colloquial use at the time.
   1. Retain the spelling of the most common hundred words, which make up about half of everyday text. Only 31 of these have irregular spelling: "all, almost, always, among, are, come, some, could, should, would, half, know, of, off, one, only, once, other, pull, push, put, as, was, what, want, who, why," and international word endings "-ion/-tion/-ssion" plus "-zion", as in "question, passion, vizion".
  
  2. Regard spelling as a standardized conventionalized representation of the language (not merely its sounds), set out as in formal speech with minimal slurring.
   Section::::Advantages.
   BULLET::::- alternate – In British English this adjective means, according to OED and other sources, "one after the other" or similar. It does not mean the same as "alternative" (see next), which OED specifically marks as an American meaning of "alternate". In international English it is thus thought better to observe the British distinction: then the meanings of "alternative" and "alternate" will be clear to everyone. (See meanings given at M-W; the same applies to the adverbs "alternately" and "alternatively".)
   By the time dictionaries were introduced in the mid 17th century, the spelling system of English had started to stabilise. By the 19th century, most words had set spellings, though it took some time before they diffused throughout the English-speaking world. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), English novelist George Eliot satirized the attitude of the English rural gentry of the 1820s towards orthography:
  
  The modern English spelling system, with its national variants, spread together with the expansion of public education later in the 19th century.
  
  Section::::Spelling irregularities.:"Ough" words.
   The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest, and English itself was supplanted in some spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, which naturally kept their French spellings as there was no reason or mechanism to change them. The spelling of Middle English, such as in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in the same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then pronunciation than modern English spelling is.
   BULLET::::- The British English doubling is used for all inflections ("-ed", "-ing", "-er", "-est") and for the noun suffixes "-er" and "-or". Therefore, British English usage is "cancelled", "counsellor", "cruellest", "labelled", "modelling", "quarrelled", "signalling", "traveller", and "travelling". Americans typically use "canceled", "counselor", "cruelest", "labeled", "modeling", "quarreled", "signaling", "traveler", and "traveling". However, for certain words such as "cancelled", the "-ll-" spelling is very common in American English as well.
  
  BULLET::::- The word "parallel" keeps a single "-l-" in British English, as in American English ("paralleling", "unparalleled"), to avoid the unappealing cluster "-llell-".
   In the early 18th century, English spelling was inconsistent. These differences became noticeable after the publishing of influential dictionaries. Today's British English spellings mostly follow Johnson's "A Dictionary of the English Language" (1755), while many American English spellings follow Webster's "An American Dictionary of the English Language" ("ADEL", "Webster's Dictionary", 1828).
   Spelling reformers argue that, although some of these links may be hidden by a reform, others would become more noticeable. For example, Axel Wijk's 1959 proposal "Regularised English" proposed changing "height" to "hight", which would link it more closely to the related word "high".
  
  In some cases, English spelling of foreign words has diverged from the current spellings of those words in the original languages, such as the spelling of "connoisseur" that is now spelled "connaisseur" in French after a French-language spelling reform in the 19th century.
   Webster's 1828 dictionary had only "-or" and is given much of the credit for the adoption of this form in the United States. By contrast, Johnson's 1755 (pre-U.S. independence and establishment) dictionary used "-our" for all words still so spelled in Britain (like "colour"), but also for words where the "u" has since been dropped: "ambassadour", "emperour", "governour", "perturbatour", "inferiour", "superiour"; "errour", "horrour", "mirrour", "tenour", "terrour", "tremour". Johnson, unlike Webster, was not an advocate of spelling reform, but chose the spelling best derived, as he saw it, from among the variations in his sources. He preferred French over Latin spellings because, as he put it, "the French generally supplied us". English speakers who moved to America took these preferences with them, and H. L. Mencken notes that "' appears in the 1776 Declaration of Independence, but it seems to have got there rather by accident than by design. In Jefferson's original draft it is spelled "honour". In Britain, examples of rarely appear in Old Bailey court records from the 17th and 18th centuries, whereas there are thousands of examples of their "-our" counterparts. One notable exception is '. ' and ' were equally frequent in Britain until the 17th century; "honor" still is, in the UK, the usual spelling as a person's name and appears in "Honor Oak", a district of London.
   The orthographies of other languages do not pay special attention to preserving similar links to loanwords. English loanwords in other languages are commonly assimilated to the orthographical conventions of those languages and so such words have a variety of spellings that are sometimes difficult to recognise as English words.
  
  Section::::Obstacles and criticisms.:Accent differences.
   In the last 250 years, since Samuel Johnson prescribed how words ought to be spelled, pronunciations of hundreds of thousands of words (as extrapolated from Masha Bells' research on 7000 common words) have gradually changed, and the alphabetic principle that lies behind English (and every other alphabetically written language) has gradually been corrupted. Advocates argue that if we wish to keep English spelling regular, then spelling needs to be amended to account for the changes.
  
  Section::::Arguments for reform.:Ambiguity.
   BULLET::::- Public resistance to spelling reform has been consistently strong, at least since the early 19th century, when spelling was codified by the influential English dictionaries of Samuel Johnson (1755) and Noah Webster (1806).
  
  BULLET::::- English vocabulary is mostly a melding of Germanic, French, Latin and Greek words, which have very different phonemes and approaches to spelling. Some reform proposals tend to favour one approach over the other, resulting in a large percentage of words that must change spelling to fit the new scheme.
   Section::::Disadvantages.
   English is a West Germanic language that has borrowed many words from non-Germanic languages, and the spelling of a word often reflects its origin. This sometimes gives a clue as to the meaning of the word. Even if their pronunciation has strayed from the original pronunciation, the spelling is a record of the phoneme. The same is true for words of Germanic origin whose current spelling still resembles their cognates in other Germanic languages. Examples include "light", German "Licht"; "knight", German "Knecht"; "ocean", French "océan"; "occasion", French "occasion". Critics argue that re-spelling such words could hide those links.
   Such ambiguity is particularly problematic in the case of heteronyms (homographs with different pronunciations that vary with meaning), such as "bow", "desert", "live", "read", "tear", "wind", and "wound". In reading such words one must consider the context in which they are used, and this increases the difficulty of learning to read and pronounce English.
  
  A closer relationship between phonemes and spellings would eliminate many exceptions and ambiguities and make the language easier and faster to master.
  
  Section::::Arguments for reform.:Undoing the changes.
   Section::::Factors in disputes.:Myths and superstitions.
  
  There are a number of alleged "rules" of unclear origin that have no rational basis or are based on things such as misremembered rules taught in school. They are sometimes described by authorities as "superstitions" or "myths". These include "rules" such as not beginning sentences with "and" or "because" or not ending them with prepositions. See common English usage misconceptions.
  
  Section::::Factors in disputes.:No central authority.
   English-language spelling reform
  
  For centuries, there has been a movement to reform the spelling of English. It seeks to change English spelling so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle.
  
  Common motives for spelling reform include quicker, cheaper learning, thus making English more useful for international communication.
   The spelling system, or orthography, of English is multi-layered, with elements of French, Latin, and Greek spelling on top of the native Germanic system. Further complications have arisen through sound changes with which the orthography has not kept pace. Compared to European languages for which official organisations have promoted spelling reforms, English has spelling that is a less consistent indicator of pronunciation, and standard spellings of words that are more difficult to guess from knowing how a word is pronounced. There are also systematic spelling differences between British and American English. These situations have prompted proposals for spelling reform in English.
   BULLET::::- Radical phonetic spelling reform could result in a multitude of different versions of written English, largely unintelligible across different accent-groups. Scottish writers might not be read by Indians. Americans would write "whut" and British "wot" for the same word.
  
  BULLET::::- Spelling reform may make pre-reform writings harder to understand and read in their original form, often necessitating transcription and republication. Even today, few people choose to read old literature in the original spellings as most of it has been republished in modern spellings.
  
  Section::::Obstacles and criticisms.:Writing conveys meaning, not phonemes.
  
presuppositions: "Another" and "an other" have identical meanings another is an acce[table spelling of an other.
corrections: "Another" usually means one more of something, and "an other" means a different item Another and an other don't mean exactly the same thing.
raw_presuppositions: "Another" and "an other" have identical meanings another is an acce[table spelling of an other.
raw_corrections: "Another" usually means one more of something, and "an other" means a different item Another and an other don't mean exactly the same thing.