On 13th February it’s Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday.
This is a very special day in the UK, when pancakes are eaten as a meal. In other countries this feast is also known as Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday. Shrove Tuesday is the last day before Lent, which starts on Ash Wednesday, and marks the start of 40 days of fasting. Over the years this day has become more popularly known as Pancake Day because eating pancakes was a way of using up rich foods such as butter and eggs, which were discouraged during Lent. The pancakes eaten on Pancake Day are very flat and thin, and are made in a frying pan. Part of the fun of making them is tossing them to turn them over. In towns around the UK pancake races take place on this day, where people run with a pancake in a frying pan, tossing it as they run along. Some people even dress up!
When does a word have a double consonant?
As a rule of thumb, it depends on how the word is written, and how many syllables it has.
For one-syllable words, if the last three letters are consonant – vowel – consonant, we double the last consonant, e.g. hot -> hotter; drop -> dropped; stop -> stopping. Compare this to write: it doesn’t end in consonant – vowel – consonant, and is therefore spelled writing, and never writting.
For two-syllable words, you need to look at the word stress, not the spelling. If the stress is on the first consonant, we never double the syllable: visit becomes visited, not visitted. If the stress is on the second syllable, then we double the consonant: begin -> beginning; admit -> admitted.
This rule works for suffixes such as -ing, -ed, -er, -est.
