German spelling is quite regular and true to the etymology of words. However, some words were deliberately given an irregular spelling. Why? To avoid homonyms: words with the same spelling and pronunciation but with a different meaning. Here are some examples.

Cipher and zero are etymological doublets: they both stem from Arabic ṣifr, which means 'empty, 0'. Ṣifr was borrowed into Medieval Latin two times: as cifra and zephirum. The descendants of cifra later lost their meaning '0' to those of zephirum. Here's how.

Why do we say feet and mice instead of *foots and *mouses? Feet and mice are relics of ancient plural forms. They used to have endings, but these disappeared after altering the preceding vowel. This is called i-umlaut. It was exactly the same mechanism that produced German Fuß ~ Füße, Maus ~ Mäuse, Low Saxon voot ~ vöte, muus ~ müse, Limburgish voot ~ veut, moes ~ muus. These languages have many more umlaut plurals than English. Here's a video on feet and mice with audio.

The word fish doesn't share any of its sounds with Spanish pez or French poisson, but all these words are etymologically related. They stem from the Proto-Indo-European root *pisk-. Here's a selection of Germanic and Romance descendants of this root.



Standard French has a two-part negation: Il ne vient pas. (He doesn't come.) However, colloquial French often drops ne, thereby returning to the Old French situation: a single negation word. The same thing actually happened in English and other languages, such as German and Dutch. This series of changes even has a name: Jespersen's Cycle. Here's more.

I've just watched The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die. One of the protagonists is king Aethelstan. His name means 'noble stone', i.e. 'gem'. It's cognate to Dutch edelsteen and German Edelstein. Here's the modern spelling pronunciation and the Old English reconstruction.

The word hen stems from the same root as charm, to chant and chanson. This root, *k(e)h₂n-, meant 'to sing'. Hen is a feminine derivation of a word that meant 'rooster'. The Germanic ancestor of this word must have originally meant 'singer'. Here's more.

To worry stems from Old English wyrġan, which meant 'to strangle'. It's related to German würgen and Dutch wurgen (to strangle). The predominant meaning of to worry is now 'to cause mental distress'. It arose from an earlier metaphorical meaning 'to vex' in the 19th century.

The word very comes from Old French verai, which became vrai (true; real) in Modern French. These words ultimately stem from Latin vērus, which has the same ancestor as German wahr and Dutch waar (true; real). Had it survived, their Old English cognate wǣr (which has only been attested once) would've become *wear in Modern English.

Why do we say he/she can, may and shall instead of cans, mays and shalls? That's because these verbs stem from ancient past tense forms. Compare he/she drank and he/she swam. The ancestor of can originally meant 'has learnt to'. Click the images for further explanation and examples in other languages.

The etymology of the word beer is debated. Some connect it to Germanic *bewwan (yield; barley); others assume a borrowing from Latin *biber (drink). Kroonen (2013) derives it from *beuran, a dissimilated form of *breuran, itself a derivation of *brewwanan (to brew). Here's how it evolved in five West-Germanic languages:

The French word 'haut' (high) arose as a contamination of two words: - the descendant of Latin 'altus' (high);

- Frankish (West-Germanic) 'haoh(a)' (high).

This contaminiation took place in a time when part of the population of modern-day northern France and southern Belgium was bilingual.

To see is not only etymologically related to sight but also to to sue, suite, suit, second, and sequence. All of these words derive from the Proto-Indo-European root *sekʷ-. Its meaning was 'to follow', which in Proto-Germanic shifted to 'to follow with the eyes', hence 'to see'. Here's more.

The words yard, garden and garth all stem from one and the same Germanic word. Yard is the native English form, garden took a detour via Old French, and garth was borrowed from Old Norse. These words are also distantly related to Latin hortus (garden), Russian górod (city) and Irish gort (field). Here's more.

What words did people have for colours in Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of English, 2000 years ago? Here are nine colours and their reconstructed Proto-Germanic (PGm) names, the Old English descendants of these words (OE, 9th century CE), and the modern outcomes.

The meanings of words constantly change. This is called semantic drift. Sometimes, a meaning radically changes over time. For example, a girl used to be a child of any gender, a hussy used to be a housewife, and a knight used to be a boy. Here are four types of semantic drift.

What did people call their relatives in Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of English, 2000 years ago? And what were the Old English descendants of these words? Some didn't make it into modern English. What would their forms have been if they had. Click the image to find out.

What were the names of our body parts 1200 years ago in Old English? And what are their reconstructed forms in Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of all Germanic languages? Here they are - from head to toe.

Beautiful is a peculiar word. It's an adjective derived from a noun that was derived from an adjective with exactly the same meaning as beautiful. In other words: it was suffixed two times, only for its meaning to do a full 360. Here are two other examples.

Champagne and campaign stem from one and the same Latin word: campānia 'plain; countryside'. The name of the French wine was derived from a region whose Latin name meant 'countryside surrounding Reims', and military campaigns used to be conducted in the open field. Here's more.