For all you non-native English speakers out there, “read” is pronounced like “lead”, and “read” is pronounced like “lead”.
Follow
@dgar More seriously,
one pair is pronouned like "red" and "led", the other pair like "reed" and "leed" - all English words as well.
The secret to English spelling is understanding that the rules are actually consistent for each source language - but there are a lot of source languages. 50% latin, 25% Greek, Saxon (short words like dog, cow, cat), Old French, German, Hebrew, and many more.
Many words from Latin and Greek are duplicated. E.g. indigestion and dyspepsia have identical meaning, but come from Latin and Greek respectively.
