Word Play: Accidental vocabulary

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Well, we’ve done all the totaling up and double-checking on the December Giving Drive—and it adds up to this: we owe you a word of thanks. You’re always there for us, each of these giving drives just proves it, and it’s what keeps us going.

To every single giver of every single dollar in our December Giving Drive—thank you.

BROWN: Once again, you showed up in a big way. Your generosity strengthened this work as we’re off and running into a new year, and it’s been such an encouragement to our entire staff.

EICHER: So whether you considered your gift large or small, whether it was one time or ongoing, it’s going to make a real difference for us in 2026!

Up next on The World and Everything in It: mistaken meanings that stuck.

BROWN: From printing mistakes to mispronunciations, George Grant has a look at the linguistic accidents that somehow made it into our everyday speech. It’s Word Play, for January.

GEORGE GRANT: According to Mario Andrew Pei, the renowned Italian-born American linguist, “Of all the words that exist in any language, only a small minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are coined words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new needed meanings. The language mint is more than a mint; it is a great manufacturing center, where all sorts of productive activities go on unceasingly.”

Sometimes, though, that linguistic manufacturing process goes awry and new words are produced, not by design, but by mishap. These accidental terms are sometimes called ghost words. They generally originate from typographical errors, misprints, misspellings, or mispronunciations. If the errors are widely repeated, ghost words can then enter into legitimate usage, taking on lives of their own. 

Examples abound: The word apron comes from the Medieval French naperon. English speakers mispronounced a naperon as an apron, and over time the misunderstanding persisted. Algorithm comes from the Medieval Latin, algorismus. The word was simply a bad translation of al-Khwarizmi, the name of a pioneering Arab mathematician. The word sneeze was originally spelled with an F, not an S—fneeze. In early typography a lowercase F could easily be confused with an uppercase S. Eventually, this ghost misreading became normative.

In Middle English, a single pea was called a pease. It was often misinterpreted as a plural word however, due to its final S sound. And as a result, a singular version of the word came into common usage and the old plural, pesen, was abandoned. The word varsity was originally versity, an abbreviation of university. But somewhere along the way a combination of mishearing, mispronouncing, and misspelling gave us a whole new ghost word. The French term nompere, meant “one without equal.” Spoken aloud, a noumpere was erroneously heard as an oumpere, and over time, the mistake morphed into our word umpire.

Tornado is a misrendering of the Spanish term tronada, meaning “thunderstorm.” Eventually, perhaps due to sloppy syntax, the R and O were inverted, creating the modern ghost word tornado. An ekename was an Anglo-Saxon term for a secondary or unofficial name, literally an “also-name.” Inevitably, ekename was misheard and repeated as a nickname.

A host of other ghost words have found their way into our everyday conversations: squeeze, ammunition, sashay, okay, expedite, culprit, ingot, abacot, and gravy.

Though the story is perhaps apocryphal, my favorite ghost word is pumpernickel. It supposedly comes from a quip of Napoleon who dismissed the dense, earthy German bread as, “C’est pain pour Nicole!” meaning, fit only for his horse.

Perhaps James Joyce was right, declaring that, “Mistakes are but portals of discovery,” even when it comes to our vocabulary!

I’m George Grant.

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