The 32 Ways to Say “Onion”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Joan from Augusta, Georgia.

My grandfather, he was born in Georgia in 1933, and he, when I was growing up, he always called onions, ernions, and I’ve never heard anyone else call them that.

And I was just curious if it was a dialect to Georgia, or if anyone else used that, if it was just something special to him.

And it was just always something funny growing up to hear him say onion, like an onion sandwich instead of onion.

Onion. So are these those delicious Vidalia onions from Georgia or any kind of onion?

I’m sure they were they were mainly Vidalia.

And if you spelled that, am I understanding that would be E-R-N-I-O-N, onion?

Yes, that’s what I think.

Okay. Your grandfather had a dialect feature.

Yeah. There are records going back as far as the 1700s of people in the United States pronouncing onion a lot of different ways.

It could come out as ingen or onion or onion or anger or onion. Lots of spellings, lots of pronunciations.

And all of them going back ultimately to this problem of the word being borrowed from French, where the French pronunciation never fully translated into English in any one way.

So think about it like this.

Onion is a French word.

It’s onion, something like that.

It was borrowed multiple times into English because for a long time it was only a French word.

But as it got borrowed and anglicized, all these different traditions of pronouncing it caught on throughout the different regions of English.

And then when you tack on top of that, all this other dialect stuff going on where people have their own particular ways and their own particular geographies, then it transformed even more.

I think I counted 32 possible pronunciations of this word over the last 300 years.

That’s crazy.

Grant, you really know your onions.

But yeah so it’s just it really has to do about it being a being borrowed multiple times from French into English and be no one pronunciation ever winning out until ultimately in the last hundred years onion winning out and it’s weird that we pronounce both of those os is a schwa right sound so that itself is weird even now even though we think of that as ordinary pronunciation, that is odd to pronounce O’s as us, as schwa’s.

We just don’t do that for many words except maybe mother and brother.

Joan, I’m curious about those sandwiches.

I think it was just sliced onions with mayonnaise and white bread.

There’s nothing I want to eat.

Oh, my.

But he liked them.

There’s a lot of solid vitamins in that.

Here’s the thing.

I just want to say about onions and speak on behalf of the onion.

When we think about scurvy and ancient sailing days and we think about lemons and limes, the answer wasn’t lemon and limes.

It was onions.

An onion a week will give you enough vitamin C to keep off scurvy.

Is that right?

Yeah.

I didn’t know that.

And onions keep longer.

What about onions?

Onions keep even longer still.

But anyway, yeah.

So your grandpa was, he was fine.

He was onion.

It’s a thing.

And it’s a bit of color that I love in our language.

Well, thank you.

I’m glad to know he didn’t just make it up that it came from somewhere.

And I think I’ll keep calling it Ernie so that my kids can keep that little piece of him going.

Yeah, hang on to those linguistic heirlooms, Joan.

Yes, for sure.

Joan, call us again sometime with another question from your grandfather’s language, all right?

Okay, thank you all so much.

Be well. Bye-bye.

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