Yuki

Through, though, thought, tough, thorough. Five words, five sounds, one spelling pattern.

The borrowed-words half explains the rest: words arrive from many languages and mostly keep their original clothes, so you are not reading one spelling system, you are reading five stacked on top of each other.

Which is why rules have so many exceptions. The exceptions are other languages.

Learned it as an adult and the printing press explanation is the one that made it bearable, because it turns the spelling from an insult into an accident of timing.

The spelling was frozen by a technology, then the pronunciation kept moving for two hundred years with nothing to anchor it. Nobody designed this. It is a photograph of a language mid-sentence.