Endnotes Spelling Bee: One

Continuing our series of short episodes about individual problematic spellings in English, responding to comments from our Spelling video . Thanks to Corey Cook for this suggestionthe word 'One'.

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Endnotes Spelling Bee! In this miniseries I’m following up on the question I asked in my video about Spelling: what are your spelling pet peeves? Viewer Corey Cook asked why the word one is pronounced like won.

The funny thing about this word is that the spelling actually does make sense, it’s the pronunciation that’s weird. There are actually two issues here, the sound of the vowel and the /w/ sound at the beginning. Let’s take it back to the Old English form an. The vowel there is a long /a:/, and typically that corresponds to a Modern English long /o:/ sound. So for instance Old English ban becomes Modern English bone, and Old English ac becomes Modern English oak. And initially that’s the path that Old English an took, with the spelling 'one' making perfect sense if we pronounced it /on/. In fact we still see that pronunciation in the words only, literally “one-like”, and alone, literally “all-one”. However, in one of the quirks of regional sound changes that occasionally happen, the non-standard pronunciation /wʌ/ arose in the south-west of England and eventually spread. In addition to the vowel changing from /o:/ to /ʌ, this pronunciation developed a back-glide before the vowel, that /w/ sound. Before the spelling became standardized there were in fact spellings with 'w', and both pronunciations seem to have survived until the 17th century. As late as 1685, schoolmaster Christopher Cooper called the /wʌ/ pronunciation “barbarous” in his Grammar of the English Language. So in the end we’re left with the spelling of the once standard form but the pronunciation of a regional form. By the way, similar shifts happened with other words too, such as oak and oat which have had regional forms such as wuk and wut that didn’t become standard. So maybe in those regions one isn’t the loneliest number!

I’ll be continuing to respond to your comments and suggestions in more Spelling Bee videos intermittently for the next while, in between other main videos. Thanks for all the responses! As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!