This week: the four-letter combination "ough" has at least eight pronunciations. English, why are you like this? Let's figure it out.
Thinking Fast, Thinking Slough
Ough is just weird, man. Depending on how you count, it can be pronounced at least eight different ways1, none of which follow any particular rhyme or reason. Learning which word uses which pronunciation drives second language speakers to distraction and sends English teachers over the wall trying to explain just how we got here2.
I mean, look at the examples just from the poem used in the image above: tough, bough, cough, dough, hiccough, thorough, slough, and through. Those obviously follow a rhyme scheme, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re all pronounced differently from each other with no pattern as to which words use which pronunciation. It’s also only about half the pronunciations available…
So let's break it down a bit. First, when we talk about ough, we're really talking about two different things, orthography, or how we write, and vowel production, or, how we talk.
Pronunciation is the easy bit, comparatively. English has somewhere between 14 and 25 vowel sounds, depending on how you count. See, because English is so widespread and so informal, there are a number of factors that can change the actual spoken vowel count. Everything from where a given speaker is from to how, exactly, you define the line between similar sounds, can affect the number you end up with. Which brings us to the orthographic part - with all these vowels, why do we only use five (sometimes six) letters to represent them?
The answer is surprisingly simple: Latin. Over the centuries, the modern alphabet evolved from a mixture of Germanic runes and Latin script and...you know what? As usual, Wikipedia has a great summary:
It is a true alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2,500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, and Etruscan. The phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles ("hands") developed.
Included in all these changes was a narrowing of the sounds associated with each letter until we had the orthographic vowels. But what we didn't have was a standardized spelling system. Here's Wikipedia again:
Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad degree of standardisation. This standardization began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most letters also have multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context.
In other words, English has been coalescing around a standardized spelling for about four hundred years, mainly through the rise of the printing press and other technological innovations. The problem being that there was nobody in charge of ALL the printing presses and so, as different people began to create documents and manuscripts, they kind of made up the spelling based on their best guesses. And when you got a popular document that everyone wanted to read, you tended to end up with a spelling that stuck for a while.
Which brings us back to ough. English, as we know, loves itself a loan word or three. As different loan words were brought in, set in type, and entered into the vernacular, one particular combination began to emerge as being extremely versatile. Ough, as well as its cousin, augh, has no actual pattern to its usage. Rather, each and every word that uses it has its own distinct etymology, meaning that ough is so weird and mixed-up because English itself is weird and mixed-up. I mean, there's an argument to be made that a definitive work of the history of ough (and augh) is the history of English spelling, pronunciation, and orthography in general3.
So where does that leave us? I don't know4. I mean, I was watching a t.v. show recently called Slow Horses. It's about a group of disgraced MI5 agents who work out of Slough House5. And I'm still not sure how to say that. I mean, I am. It's right there in the name: the slow horses are called slow horses because they work out of Slough House. Slow = slough, right? Then why do I keep wanting to pronounce it as /sluff/ as in slough off dead skin?
Anyway. The quote that heads up this article is from an anonymous poem called The King's English. I don't know much about the poem other than I've seen versions of it floating around the internet since I got my very first email account back in the early 90s. It's a compendium of several of English's more maddening vocabulary and it's something I want to give every English learner, along with a gift basket and apology. After all, one ough ought to be enough, right6?
Down the Rabbit Hole
As is so often the case, in the interest of keeping this (somewhat) readable, I cut several hundred words of material. So, here are a few links for the morbidly curious regarding English orthography and the history of the alphabet:
For a proper, academic overview, start with Ryan Miller’s chapter in The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching called “English Orthography and Reading.”
For a more down-to-Earth read about ough words, try this post from Grammarphobia, dated from 2017.
And here’s a fun read from DS Bigham on Slate about the number of vowels in English: How Many Vowels Are There in English? (Hint: It’s More Than AEIOUY.)
But if you’re really wanting a deep dive, try Christopher Upward and George Davidson’s The History of English Spelling.
From the Archives
Here’s an interesting article from a couple of years ago, October 2020 to be precise, wherein I just rounded up a few things I was interested in at that moment. Might be worth a minute of your time?
Although when I was in school, we were taught spelling through the Spalding method and it only counts six ways...
And that’s not even counting that it’s actually a word in and of itself.
I'm 99% certain it's been done, but if it hasn't, I'm calling dibs.
I tried to write it as "I don't knough" but I couldn't do it. Just couldn't. You knough?
I mean the less said about British place names and all their weird spellings, the better. I attended Leicester University and I’ve ridden through all the London tube stations so you’d think I’d know how to pronounce things. You’d be wrong.
Yes, I know the joke about one egg being an oeuf in France. Don’t even get me started on all their weird spelling rules.
You may know about the French "oeuf" (/œf/) but do you know about its plural, "oeufs"? Its pronunciation is, obviously, /ø/ !