has chosen. In his opening chapter of all editions of Teach Yourself Dutton Speedwords titled "Dutton Speedwords Analysed" (TYDS, pages 7–9) he describes some of the principles he used. For example, using Horn's analysis of frequently used words to determine how much to abbreviate or truncate his Speedword vocabulary, and, drawing on words common to several European languages. But this does not equate to a systematic account of how new technical words and expressions could be added to the Speedword vocabulary. Nor does it show that the existing Speedwords were wisely chosen. The major deficiencies arise from overcoming confusion caused by apparent inconsistencies in understanding what is meant by particular Speedwords given the variety of Speedword formation methods available. There are four possible areas of confusion. First, deciphering the meaning of a Speedword can produce several possible candidate meanings. There are 20 suffixes (TYDS, page 90). The practice of incorporating a Speedword suffix into the Speedword meakes it difficult to decide whether a Speedword is either a Speedword stem (that is, an indivisible element) or a Speedword and a suffix. For example, the Speedword 'de' is day, 'deb' is debt but 'debe' is yesterday. The suffix 'e' is an augmentive (TYDS, page 37) signalling a comparative increase. So, an untutored interpretation would suggest that 'debe' is a large debt. Dutton's answer to this objection is that they need to be learnt. Second, contractions of frequently used Speedwords actually multiply the vocabulary by creating new Speedwords. For example, 'debe' yesterday is shortened to 'db', and 'jecen' percent is shortened to 'jc'. Again, Dutton's answer to this objection is that they need to be learnt. Third, there are some puzzling inconsistencies. For example, 'La' is great, 'Mla' is greater. 'M' is also used as an abbreviation for 'Mr'. It is unclear whether this is a misprint with the L in lower case and what the 'm' signifies. Finally, Dutton encourages joining Speedwords together as compounds except where they are equivalent to an existing Speedword. This creates new Speedwords which become unrecognisable because they are not in the dictionary, Again, Dutton's answer to this objection is that they need to be learnt. The disadvantage is it increases the vocabulary reducing the benefit from keeping the vocabulary small. In summary, these shortcomings are resolvable. Ambiguity could be resolved by obtaining a copy of the Speedwords publication which lists the 493 elementary Speedwords but this