The right way to spell right

Middle English, the form of English in use when it became an official language of record, had a whopping seventy-seven recorded ways to spell “right.”

Kory Stamper, Word by Word

Kory Stamper

This boggles my mind. Seventy-seven ways to spell a one-syllable word? Middle English refers to the English spoken in England from about 1150 to 1500. At that time relatively few people could read and write, meaning that those 77 different spellings come from a relatively small sample of written material. This was also, for the most part, before the printing press, not to mention dictionaries and the standardized spelling that resulted from these developments. So this meant that when those few people who could write in Middle English did write, they were free to spell words however they thought they should be spelled, by sounding them out like a first-grader. Readers then had to say the words and decide from sound and context what they meant.

But how many ways can you spell right by sounding it out? I can do right, rite, rit, write and that’s about it. I don’t think I could come up with 73 more. Fortunately Kory Stamper gives us the whole list. I won’t list them all, but here are some of them: reght, reghte, reht, reit, rethe, reyght, rich, richt, riht, rihtt, rihtte, rit, ritth, rothes, ryde, ryg, rygt, ryt, ryth and wryght. And that's just 20.

Some of those spellings seem weird to us, but then r-i-g-h-t seems a bit weird, as well, with two of the five letters being silent and seemingly unnecessary. Why do you suppose they settled on that spelling rather than something simpler like reit or ryt?

Many English spellings seem strange, but we can all be thankful that somebody, perhaps Samuel Johnson in many cases, settled the matter long ago. At least we no longer must decide between rihtte, ritth and 70-some other possibilities.