English spelling seems so irregular because it preserves history instead of matching sound. Early on, this Germanic tongue absorbed Norse and French influences from invaders, and in the late 1400s, printing helped standardize early spellings just...
Our conversation about bang out sick and bang in sick, both meaning to “call one’s employer to say they’re not coming in to work,” prompted a response from historian Judith Flanders, who notes that in the UK, there’s a tradition of banging out...
Why do we write the word I as a capital letter when using it to refer to ourselves? Is English the only language that capitalizes the first person singular pronoun? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Why is the Pronoun “I”...
Was English spelling standardized before the advent of the printing press? No, but there were some significant periods in history where spelling became a little more fixed. Among them are the replacing of the Runic alphabet with the Roman alphabet...
Joan grew up in Yorkshire, England, then moved to New Orleans, Louisiana. There she was surprised to hear some people use the term evening instead of afternoon to refer to “the period between noon and 5 p.m.” The word evening is used that way in...
What is the letter H doing in the English word ghost? The answer has to do with 15th-century Flemish typesetters working for the English printer William Caxton. They often added an H after an initial hard G to reflect the spelling of cognates in...