Q: Why isn’t the letter “c” pronounced in “indict”?
A: Interestingly, the verb “indict” wasn’t spelled or pronounced with a “c” when it first appeared in Middle English in the early 14th century. In fact it wasn’t even spelled with a “c” in Anglo-Norman or Old French, the sources of the English word.
The “c” crept into the spelling in the early 17th century when scholars apparently decided to make the verb look more like indictare, an Anglo-Latin term for “indict” that developed in medieval legal writing in England.
As it happens, indictare didn’t exist in Classical Latin, where a “t”-less version, indicare, meant “to give evidence against,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The medieval legal term combined the prefix “in-” with the Classical Latin dictare (“to say, declare, dictate”).
As the OED explains, the medieval legal term “seems to be merely the latinized form of the Anglo-Norman and Middle English verb.” In other words, it was apparently a misconceived scholarly attempt to make the Anglo-Norman and Old French look more Latin.
When “indict” first appeared in Middle English in the early 14th century as endyte or endite, Oxford says, it meant “to bring a charge” against someone or “to accuse (a person)” of a crime.
The earliest OED example, which we’ve expanded, is from Handlyng Synne (1303), a devotional work by the English historian and poet Robert Mannyng:
what shul we sey of þys dytours,
Þys fals men, þat beyn sysours,
Þat, for hate, a trewman wyl endyte,
And a þefe for syluer quyte?(What shall we say of these accusers,
These false men that be jurymen,
But for hate will indict a true man,
And for silver acquit a thief?)
The first OED citation for “indict” spelled with a “c” is from a legal textbook: “If he bee indicted of Felonie, or Treason.” From The Lawyers Light: Or, a Due Direction for the Study of the Law for Methode (1629), by John Doddridge, an English lawyer, judge, and legislator.
In a post we wrote in 2022 about the silent “b” in English, we quote the classicist J. D. Sadler as saying, “There are many words borrowed from Latin through French where we have gone back to the Latin root to replace a letter lost in transit. Most involve the initial consonant in the groups bt, ct, lt, and pt.”
In his article, “Popular Etymology” (The Classical Journal, February-March 1971), Sadler gives “debt,” “doubt,” and “subtle” as examples, along with “arctic,” “perfect,” “subject,” “verdict,” “victuals,” “assault,” “fault,” “somersault,” and “receipt.”
In some of these words, he notes, the initial letter of the consonant cluster is mute, while in others “we have recovered the sound.” He adds that “perhaps words of this sort [those latinized retroactively] should be termed examples of scholarly etymology, rather than of popular etymology.”
We’ve written several other posts on silent letters, including one in 2024 about the final “e” in “dote,” “fate,” “hate,” and “note,” as well as one in 2009 on the “gh” in “caught,” “ought,” “thought,” and “bought.”
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