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How is Wednesday pronounced?
Why is Wednesday spelled 'Wenzday'?
Where did the word 'Wednesday' come from?
Why is Wednesday called Wodan?
Wednesday is just one example of words — like February and ptarmigan — where letters appear in a word's spelling but not in its pronunciation. The curious case of America's silent "d" doesn't extend to parts of England, Scotland and India, where many people enunciate the letter.
May 13, 2019 · As it turns out, Wednesday actually has Germanic linguistic origins. It is derived from the Old English word, Wōdnesdæg , which honors the Germanic god Wodan. Wodan was one of the most important deities of Anglo-Saxon and Continental Germanic polytheism and was especially prominent in England during the fifth and sixth centuries, before ...
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Way back in the 600s, Christian missionaries arrived in Anglo-Saxon England with their Roman alphabet and tried to make it fit the language they found there. They had to come up with ways to spell sounds like “th” and “/x/”—a back of the throat consonant like the one in German word ach. For a while they made use of runic characters (þ, ȝ, ð) and va...
Two things happened in the early 1500s that really messed with English spelling. First, the new technology of the printing press meant publishers—rather than scribes—were in charge, and they started to standardize spelling. At the very same time, the Great Vowel Shift was underway. People were changing the way they pronounced vowels in vast groups ...
Woden was an Anglo-Saxon god associated with both fury and poetic inspiration. He also had a career in curing horses and carrying off the dead, and Wednesday is his day. Woden’s day has gone through various spellings—wodnesdaeg, Weodnesdei, Wenysday, wonysday, Weddinsday—but even though Shakespeare tried to match pronunciation with his very reasona...
The Romans helped get the Anglo-Saxon language into writing, but when the French arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066, they brought their own words with them—and English vocabulary was never the same again. One of the expressions they brought was iu parti (jeu parti, “divided game”) which became Iupartye, ieoperde, and yeopardie before settli...
Those sneaky r’s also like to disappear completely, especially when there are two of them near each other (see: surprise, berserk, governor). February also came into English from French. The French feverier first became English feverere, or feverell. But in the 16th and 17th centuries, a craze for all things classical caused writers to start re-Lat...
Receipt is also a victim of the Latinizing craze. When the word came into English from French it had no p, and no one pronounced it as if it did. Enthusiastic Latinizers later added the p on analogy with the Latin receptus. This is also how debt and doubt got their b’s, salmon and solder got their l’s, and indict got its c.
Most of the words that got Latinized did have some distant connection, through French, with the ancient Latin words that dictated their new spellings. However, sometimes a Latin-inspired letter got stuck into a word that hadn’t even come through Latin. Island came from the Old English íglund, and was spelled illond, ylonde, or ilande until someone ...
In addition to re-Latinizing, there was Greekification (not a technical term!). Asthma first showed up as asma or asmyes. But words associated with science and medicine were particularly susceptible to the urge to connect to the classics, so people started writing asthma instead of asma, diarrhea instead of diaria, phlegm instead of fleme... you ge...
From the very beginning, when this word came into English in the 1500s, there were two spelling variants and two pronunciations: Coronel came through French and colonel through Italian. Colonel preserved the look of the related word column, but coronel brought a nice, regal crown to mind (though it wasn’t actually etymologically related). So the wo...
Another wave of French words—from the high life, fashion, courtly manners, cuisine, and the arts—came into English starting around 1700. We got words like bouillon, casserole, vinaigrette, protégé, ballet, bouquet, boutique, silhouette, etiquette, faux pas, and hors d’oeuvres. These words have kept their French spellings, and we get as close as we ...
Nov 21, 2023 · Stumbling upon the word Wednesday in the English language can leave many language learners scratching their heads. Indeed, why is Wednesday spelled like that? The word looks as though it would pronounce a distinct ‘d’, yet it is commonly voiced as ‘Wenzday’.
"Wednesday" was originally "Wōdnesdæg", pronounced "WODE-nez-dye"; by Shakespeare's time the "o" had changed to an "e" giving "Wednesdei" or "Wednesday", but still pronounced with three syllables. In Shakespeare's day, people spelled words in whatever way they saw fit, but a little later the spellings became fixed.
May 9, 2024 · Why on earth is Wednesday spelled like that? Apparently, it is due to the word’s German origins. “Wednesday” was pronounced more like “Wodan’s Day” in old German, a tribute to the Anglo-Saxon god Wodan. On Wednesdays we wear pink. 15. Stomach . How it is mistakenly pronounced: “Stoh-mahk” or “Stoh-match”
