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 their own language. While many of those spellings didn’t stick, the G in ghost did, probably because the term Holy Ghost appeared so often in early printed works. Linguist Arika Okrent explains a host of linguistic conundrums like that in her new, highly accessible book Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme — and Other Oddities of the English language. (Bookshop|Amazon). This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Does “Ghost” Have an “H”?”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. Did you ever think about why we spell the word ghost the way we do? Why do we spell it G-H-O-S-T? Well, it wasn’t always that way, and here’s what happened. In the mid-15th century, there was an English businessman named William Caxton who moved from London to the wealthy city of Bruges in what’s modern-day Belgium. And there he got in on the ground floor of a new technology, the printing press. Eventually, he moved back to England. And in those days, typesetting was still really new. It was time-consuming. It was challenging to learn.
And so it made sense that Caxton would bring in workers who already knew the business, even if they weren’t that familiar with English spelling. So he recruited some fellow printers whose native language was Flemish, which is the variant of Dutch that was spoken there in Bruges. And English spelling in those days was still a little bit unsettled, but generally the English spelling for ghost was G-A-S-T at that time. And in Flemish, on the other hand, the initial hard G sound before a vowel was rendered as G-H. So in Flemish, the word for ghost was spelled G-H-E-E-S-T.
So when these Flemish-speaking typesetters came across words that resembled similar words in their own language, they’d often add that H after the G. And in fact, you can find books from the early days of printing in English that include an initial GH in words like girl and goose and guest and guess and goat. Those spellings didn’t last, but there was one expression that appeared over and over in a lot of the early works that Caxton printed, and that term was holy ghost. And the expression holy ghost appeared so often in those early works with that Flemish spelling that the initial gh in that word happened to become standard in English.
And that’s one of the wonderful stories that you’ll learn in the new book by linguist Erika Okrant. It’s called Highly Irregular, Why Tough Through and Dough Don’t Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language. And Grant, the book is really a lot of fun to just page through and get answers to those questions, those pesky questions about why English is so strange. Yes, it really is a great book. She’s done all new research, it looks like. It’s well written, easy to read, and something that I think you could recommend to middle schoolers, high schoolers, college kids, the family. And I very much enjoyed it.
Yeah, it’s a very amiable, accessible book. It answers questions like, you know, what’s the difference between big and large, really? Why can we say big about certain words and large about other ones? Or why do we say how come when we want to say why? There are all these kinds of questions that she answers very thoroughly, and you get a taste of the history of the English language as well. Yeah, so this book, Highly Irregular by Erica Okrant, will be linked on our website.
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