1180. Why does "Ye Olde Shoppe" look old-fashioned? This week, we look at the vanished letters of English — thorn, eth, and yogh — and at why English has so many words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, such as "compact" (an agreement) and "compact" (to press together).
1180. Why does "Ye Olde Shoppe" look old-fashioned? This week, we look at the vanished letters of English — thorn, eth, and yogh — and at why English has so many words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, such as "compact" (an agreement) and "compact" (to press together).
The homographs segment was written by Samantha Enslen who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
The Old English segment was written by Karen Lunde who writes the "I'll Go First" newsletter. Find her on igofirst.org.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today we’re talking about words that are spelled the same but sound different, and then we'll talk about some lost letters of the alphabet.
by Samantha Enslen
One of our listeners named Gregg wrote in recently with a question. He wanted to know if there’s a term for words that change their definition when their syllable emphasis changes.
He mentioned the word “invalid” as an example. According to Merriam-Webster, the word means “being without foundation in fact or truth” when you stress the second syllable (as in, in-VAL-id), but it means “one that is sickly or disabled” when you stress the first syllable (as in, IN-val-id).
Good question, Gregg! There is a term for words that are spelled the same but have different meanings. They’re called “homographs.” The “homo” root means “same,” and the “graph” root means “write.”
And as Gregg pointed out, some homographs are pronounced differently, like “wind” (the movement of air) and “wind” (to coil something like a string around another object). Others are pronounced the same, like “odd” (meaning strange) and “odd” (meaning a number that can’t be divided evenly by two).
Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone if we just had separate words for totally separate concepts? Here’s why we don’t.
Some homographs have different etymologies. For example, the verb “match” comes from an Old English word that means “equal” or “mate” (as in saying someone in love has "found their match"), whereas the noun “match” (the fire stick) comes from a Greek word that meant “lamp wick”: “myxa.” (And the word “myxa,” in turn, was originally “mucus, based on [the] notion of [a] wick dangling from the spout of a lamp like snot from a nostril.” I bet you never thought that etymology could be so disgusting!)
Another example is the word “compact.” The noun “compact” (meaning an agreement) comes from the Latin verb “compacisci,” meaning to covenant together. The past tense of this verb was “compactum.” In contrast, the verb “to compact” (meaning to press tightly together) comes from the Latin verb “compingĕre,” which had the same meaning. And the past tense of that verb was “compactus.”
Even some words that seem similar can have different origins. For example, think of the noun “ear.” It can be the thing you hear with or where corn grows on a plant. Both of those kind of stick out from a body or stalk, so it would be easy to assume they’re related — but they aren’t. The hearing ear comes from the Old English word “ēare” that meant the same thing, whereas the food type of ear comes from the Old English word “ēar” that meant "spike."
There’s another reason two words that are spelled the same can have different sounds and meanings. It’s because English is what’s called a “stress-timed language.” Therefore, in English, the meaning of words can change depending on which syllable we stress.
For example, compare the word “MIN-ute” with “min-UTE.” These two words are spelled the same but have different meanings. Same thing with “PRO-ject” and “pro-JECT.”
Stress-timed languages have some predictable rules. For example, in two-syllable words, nouns and adjectives usually have the first syllable stressed. Think of the words PIC-ture, TA-ble, and FLOW-er, for example.
In contrast, two-syllable words that are verbs usually have the second syllable stressed. Think of pro-VIDE, com-POSE, or con-DUCT.
Our ability to create different meanings by stressing different syllables means that English has tons of homographs. Think of OB-ject versus ob-JECT, PRE-sent versus pre-SENT, IM-port versus im-PORT, SUS-pect versus sus-PECT. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Not all languages work this way. In contrast to stress-timed languages like English, there are syllable-timed languages. In those languages, syllables tend to take up more equal amounts of time, instead of some being stressed much more than others. You can hear this distinction if you compare the word for “library” in English versus Spanish.
In English, we say “LI-brary,” stretching out the “I” sound and saying it more clearly than the “-brary” part. “LI-brary.” “Library.”
The same word in Spanish is “biblioteca.” Each syllable in that word gets about the same emphasis. “Bib-li-o-te-ca.”
Another example is the word for trash. In English, we say “GAR-bage,” emphasis on the “GAR” and hardly saying the “uh” sound in “-bage” at all. That reduced "uh" sound that shows up in unstressed syllables, by the way, is called a “schwa.”
In contrast, the Spanish word for garbage is “basura.” We pronounce each vowel sound in that word clearly. “Ba-su-ra.” None of them are swallowed.
I’ll say one final thing about homographs. Occasionally, they are created almost accidentally when we add suffixes to words. Think about the words “sewer,” meaning a drainpipe, and “sewer,” meaning one who sews. The words aren’t related at all. They just happen to be spelled the same because we add the suffix “-er” to describe someone who does an action.
We see the same thing with “batter,” meaning a mixture of two or more ingredients, and “batter,” meaning one who swings a bat.
To sum up, homographs are words that have different meanings but are spelled the same. They may or may not have different origins and different pronunciations. Thanks again for the question, Gregg!
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.
by Karen Lunde
Have you ever spotted a shop with a sign that says something like "Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe?" You might have noticed extra letters, like an E on the end of "olde" or an extra "P-E" on the end of "shoppe." And, if you're like most people, you probably pronounced the phrase the same way I just did:
"YEE Old Curiosity Shop."
But if you happened to be with a well-informed friend who loves Old English, pronouncing "Y-E" as "yee" could trigger a "Well, actually…" moment! Because that "Y" isn't a Y at all. It's a linguistic ghost; a placeholder for a letter that used to exist in English but has since become extinct. Well, except on "ye olde signs" intended to be old-fashioned and quaint.
That's because that "Y" is a placeholder for a letter that has since disappeared from the English alphabet. The letter was called "thorn," and we'll talk about its pronunciation in a moment. We'll also talk about its cousin eth, and a shapeshifter of a letter called yogh. They're three letters that used to be a normal part of English but have vanished over time, leaving some confusing spelling in their wake.
Let's start with thorn, because it has the most dramatic origin story.
Old English — the language of Beowulf, spoken roughly between 450 and 1150 CE — had a sound that Latin didn't have: the "th" sound, as in "the" and "this." Because Latin didn't have the sound, it also lacked a letter for it in its alphabet.
The Anglo-Saxons solved this problem by borrowing from a runic alphabet called Elder Futhark. They adapted a rune into a letter they called "thorn." It looked kind of like a letter P, but with a taller top tail. Or, you could think of it as a lowercase L sticking out its tongue. For centuries, thorn did its job beautifully.
But then, in late medieval handwriting, thorn and the letter Y started looking nearly identical on the page. That was the first stage of English drifting away from the letter thorn. Later, when William Caxton brought the printing press from continental Europe to England in 1476, the continental typefaces didn't include the thorn. But printers needed something to represent that T-H sound. The closest letter they had? You've probably guessed: it was Y.
So, printers started using Y to replace thorn, more for practical reasons than anything else. The economics of printing simply didn't leave room for it. By the 16th century, thorn had basically disappeared from written English, later replaced by the T-H combo we use today.
And that brings us back to "Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe." It sounds charmingly old-fashioned to say it that way, but it's also wrong. Because that Y represents an Old English alphabet letter that was pronounced with a T-H sound: "The Old Curiosity Shop."
I'll leave it up to you whether you want to educate your friends about thorn the next time you go into an antique shop or visit a Renaissance fair.
And then there's eth, thorn's sibling. Or maybe it's more of a coworker. The lowercase form is written like a lowercase D with a curved stroke through the ascender. In uppercase, it looks more like a capital D with a line through the left vertical bar.
Eth also made the T-H sound. So, you might be thinking, Wait, if we already had thorn for T-H, then why did we need eth?
Valid question! Because mostly we didn't.
In modern English linguistics, we recognize two distinct T-H sounds. There's the voiced one — as in "this," "there," and "the," where your vocal cords buzz a bit. And then there's the voiceless one, as in "thin," "think," and "thorn," where they don't. The International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA, now uses eth for the voiced sound and thorn for the voiceless one, but that's a modern assignment. In Old English, the two letters weren't reliably linked to one sound or the other, which is actually why they were redundant in the first place. Linguist David Crystal has noted that thorn and eth were often used interchangeably, even within the same manuscript — the choice might have come down to something as simple as accent, personal preference, or which letter the scribe thought looked nicer on the page that day.
So, eth was a kind of unnecessary letter from early on. It faded first — becoming hard to distinguish from the letter D — and then thorn followed. Both were eventually replaced by T-H. But there's one exception! In Iceland, thorn and eth are still alive and well. Modern Icelandic still uses both letters, and they make the distinction precise and deliberate. So, if you ever want to write in a language that kept its original runic T-H letters, you have options.
And then there's yogh. Both uppercase and lowercase forms look very similar to a slightly more stylish numeral 3. Yogh evolved from an early form of the letter G in Old English. It was pronounced in a few different ways depending on where it appeared in a word. At the beginning of a word, or when it followed an E, I, or Y, it sounded like the Y in "yellow." In the middle of a word, it could sound more like a W, and so on.
When the Norman scribes arrived after the Conquest of 1066, they started replacing yogh in manuscripts with Y, G, or GH. And that's why we ended up with strange English spellings like "knight"—K-N-I-G-H-T. The French Taunter in the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail famously spoofed this confusing spelling when he called King Arthur's knights "silly English k-nnnn-iggits!"
But here's the part of the yogh story I love most. In Scotland, yogh stuck around longer than in England. And over time, the way Scots wrote yogh started to look a lot like a cursive Z. So when printing presses arrived in Scotland, printers just used the Z they had on hand to replace the yogh they didn't.
The result is that some Scottish names look like they should have a Z sound but don't. Take the late British politician Menzies [MING-iss] Campbell, for instance. His first name is spelled M-E-N-Z-I-E-S. Or the Scottish surname MacKenzie. The Z was once a yogh, meaning the name was originally pronounced more like "MacKenyie." Those strange spellings are yogh's fault. Or maybe its legacy, depending on how you look at it.
So the next time you see "Ye Olde" anything, you'll know you're not reading a Y at all — you're reading the ghost of a thorn. And the next time a Scottish name's spelling makes no sense, you can blame yogh. These letters may be gone, but they left their fingerprints all over English.
Karen Lunde is a career writer and former Quick & Dirty Tips editor. She writes I'll Go First, a Substack where she shares personal essays and memoir, then hands you a weekly writing prompt and a metaphorical pen. Find her on igofirst.org.
Finally, I have a familect story from Rebekah.
Hi, Mignon, this is Rebekah, and my familect word is "jamatize." This is a word my mom came up with in fairly recent history. This is not something I grew up with, but she says "jamatize" to sort of celebrate or eventize the moment where we get home from going out to dinner or whatever. It is and getting on our pajamas and then watching TV or playing a game. And now my grown kids say it, and we all really love to jamatize. It's like the best part of the day.
Ahh … thank you, Rebekah. It's great to have a name for it because it really is the best part of the day.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Maram Elnagheeb; Nat Hoopes; Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Holly Hutchings; and Dan Feierabend, who recently bought a 7 string guitar. Rock on!
I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.