Q: I am wondering why one pronounces “w” at the beginning of some words and not others. Those not pronounced seem to be paired with “r” (“write,” “wrong,” “wrist,” “wry,” etc.). And then there are pronunciation pairs like “wrap”/“rap,” “wrest”/“rest,” “wrote”/“rote,” and “wring”/“ring.” I assume they are unrelated.
A: The short answer is that the spelling and pronunciation of English have evolved a lot since Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—migrants from what is now Germany and Scandinavia—brought the language to England in the fifth century. And the evolution has been quite messy.
In our 2023 post about why a “w” is called a double-u, we discuss the origin and pronunciation of the letter, and we note that in Old English, the “w” sound was pronounced before the letters “l,” “r,” and “n,” a usage that died out in Middle English. The silent “w” in “wr-” spellings is a survivor of that usage.
Why, you ask, do we no longer pronounce “w” in the words “wrong,” “wrist,” “write,” “wry,” and so on? Probably because speakers of Old English and Middle English found the “wr” pronunciation difficult.
As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “Some 130 words in wr- are recorded from the Old English period, and a number of these survive in the later language, while others have been added from Dutch and Low German.”
In early use, the dictionary says, “wr is a consonantal combination occurring initially in a number of words (frequently implying twisting or distortion).”
However, the “early difficulty in pronouncing the combination may be indicated by the Old Northumbrian spellings with wur-,” the OED notes, and by the spelling of “writ” as “weritt” and “wrongous” (wrongful) as “werangus” by the 14th to 15th century.
In Middle English, Oxford says, the letter “r” is sometimes separated from the “w” by metathesis, the transposition of sounds or letters, as in “wræð” (wroth) becoming “wærð,” “wrech” (wretch) becoming “werch,” and “written” becoming “wirten.” (The letter “ð,” or eth, was pronounced “th.”)
“Signs of the dropping of the w begin to appear about the middle of the 15th cent.,” the dictionary says, citing such spellings as “ringe” for the verb “wring” and “rong” for the adjective “wrong,” and the “w”-dropping “becomes common in the 16th.”
The OED adds that “reduction of the sound is also indicated by the converse practice of writing wr- for r-, which similarly appears in the 15th cent. (in wrath for rathe), and becomes common in the 16th.” (The archaic “rathe” means prompt and eager.) In standard English, Oxford says, the extra “w” was dropped from these words in the 17th century.
As for those pronunciation pairs, you’re right in assuming that they’re unrelated etymologically. But two of the pairs might be described as acquaintances. Because of the short-lived practice of writing “wr-” for “r-,” the word “rap” was briefly spelled “wrap,” and “ring” was briefly “wring.”
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