Double Consonants

Charles Abbott

08 Dec 2025 — 1 min read

When a word contains double consonants, is it always safe to delete one letter? I did a deep dive into this topic by using a word finder tool to generate and examine a list of common words for every possible double consonant. I concluded the answer is yes with a few trivial exceptions.

Sometimes “cc” has the “s” sound for the second “c” in words like “accent” but for the sake of clarity, don’t change “cc” to “cs” as it won’t save a keyboard touch.

There are 151 words containing “kk” and none are in common usage. I found a few like “lockkeeper” and “bookkeeper” that I would pronounce both k’s and keep both but they are enough to prove the exception. A few more pairs had very few words that I could pronounce that looked suspicious. Feel free to delete one letter as there is a very low probability of being wrong.

Combinations of vowels

ae ea ai ia ao oa au ua ay ya ei ie eo oe eu ue ey ye io oi iu ui iy yi ou uo oy yo My suspicion is that if any of these combinations occurs in a syllable of a word, one letter has a fair chance

Double Vowels

We already know that it is safe to drop one letter of double consonants but what about double vowels “a”, “e”, “i”, “o” and “u”? We learned in an earlier post that “oo” has the “u” sound and is written with a ”u”. I scanned the list of words output

Sounds of “c”

If the letter “c” has a hard sound, it is written. However , if “c” has a soft sound like the letter “s”, just substitute the letter “s”. This commonly occurs when a word ends in “ce”. For example, words like face, race and nice can be shortened to fas, ras

What is a “word”?

My layman’s basic definition of “word” is that it is a combination of letters that have meaning. Sometimes the meaning changes depending on context but I’m gonna glide by that snake pit. The words I’m talking about are listed in the dictionary or they are slang words

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Combinations of vowels

Double Vowels

Sounds of “c”

What is a “word”?