means The act of writing or naming the letters of a word in their correct order.

from From Old English "spellian," meaning to tell, talk, or relate — the same root that gives us the magical "spell" and the storyteller's "gospel" (literally "good spell," or good news). The path runs through Old French "espeller," to read out letter by letter, and the senses braided together over centuries: to recite a word's letters was, in a sense, to tell its secret name. The link to incantation isn't coincidence — words and magic shared a vocabulary long before anyone held a spelling bee.