This paper examines the nature of orthography (spelling conventions) and how the different kinds of linguistic information associated with a word, principally its phonological and morphological content, contribute to its written form. A summary is given of various arguments presented in the literature as to why certain languages' orthographies do not transparently reflect pronunciation. A specific set of data (French verb inflection) is presented, and a theory of how morphological features affect the orthographic structure of the data is developed. A small lexicon is implemented to test these ideas, and the combined use of finite state transduction and default inheritance in the lexicon is discussed.