Month: March 2026

Q: How was the definite article that we now see in the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes actually pronounced in Old English and Middle English when it was written with a thorn?

A: The article “the” was originally spelled se in Old English and pronounced like a clipped version of “say” without the glide at the end. That spelling and its variants continued into Middle English.

However, the Old English article was also spelled ðe and þe during much of this period. The Anglo-Saxon runes eth (ð) and thorn (þ) were pronounced “th,” so ðe and þe did indeed sound like our word “the.”

The first example for the article “the” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an early ninth-century will in the Kentish dialect of early Old English:

“Æðelnoð se gerefa to Eastorege” (“Æðelnoð the reeve at Eastry”). From “Will of Æðelnoð & Gænburg,” Anglo-Saxon Charters (1956), by Agnes Jane Robertson.

The first example in the OED for the definite article spelled with a “th” sound is from an Old English gloss, or translation, inserted in the 10th century between the lines of Latin in the Lindisfarne Gospels.

The Anglo-Saxon scribe who wrote the gloss translated the Latin “Herodes rex” in Matthew 2:3 with an eth rune, as “Herodes ðe cynig” (“Herod the King”). The Latin itself dates from the eighth century.

The first OED example written with a thorn is from a gloss inserted during the 10th century in the eighth-century Latin of Matthew 2:9 in the Rushworth Gospels.

The scribe translated the Latin “Stella quam uiderant in oriente antecedebat eos” as “þe steorra þe hiae ær gesægon in eastdæle foreeade hię” (“The star that they had seen earlier in the east went before them”).

The first OED example for “ye” used in the sense of “the” appeared in the Middle English of the late 14th century. It’s from a 1389 list of ordinances governing guilds in Norwich, England:

“alle ye bretheren and sisteren” (English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More Than One Hundred Early English Gilds, 1892, by Joshua Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith).

Why was the article written as “ye” here, not þe, and how was it pronounced? When the  printing press arrived in England in the 15th century, printers didn’t have metal type for a thorn and substituted the letter “y,” but “ye” was pronounced as “the.” That use of “ye” for “the” probably inspired the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes.

As for the pronoun “ye,” one of four archaic forms of “you,” it was originally spelled ge in Old English and pronounced like the first two letters of the word “yes.” By early Middle English, it was spelled ȝe, with the “y” sound expressed by the yogh rune (ȝ).

The four ways of expressing “you”-ness in Old English were the singulars “thou” and “thee,” and the plurals “ye” and “you.” The Anglo-Saxons used “thou” and “ye” as subjects, “thee” and “you” as objects.

The earliest OED citation for the pronoun “ye” (spelled ge here) is from the epic poem Beowulf,  believed to date from the early 700s: “Hwæt syndon ge searohæbbendra?” (“Who are ye armor-clad weapon-bearers?”).

The first Oxford example for the ȝe spelling of the “ye” pronoun is from the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies: “Hu ȝe muȝhenn lakenn godd” (“How ye may sacrifice to God”).

The dictionary’s first example with the “ye” spelling is from Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century prose version of the legends of King Arthur:

“My fayre felawes wete ye wel that I will torne vnto kynge Arthurs party” (“My  fair fellows, know ye well that I will side with King Arthur’s party”).

We’ll end with the expression “ye gods,” which Oxford says appeared in the 16th century and was “used to express indignation, disbelief, or amazement, esp. in a consciously archaic or grandiose way.”

The OED’s first citation is from The Paradox of Marcus Tullius Cicero (circa 1543), a translation by the English grammarian Robert Whittington of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum (“Stoic Paradoxes”).

In the passage cited by the dictionary, Whittington translates the Latin “O di immortales” as “O ye goddes immortall.”

(Note: All the senses of “ye” mentioned in this post are now pronounced YEE.)

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Q: In a NY Times obituary, a historian refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as “arrogant, literate, obdurate, revengeful,” etc. Is it not odd to describe an Islamic scholar as “literate,” i.e., merely able to read and write?

A: The word “literate” meant educated or learned when it first appeared in English in the 14th century. Although the primary meaning now is able to read or write, you can still find the original sense in standard dictionaries.

Merriam-Webster includes “educated,” “cultured,” “literary”; American Heritage, “familiar with literature,” “literary”; Cambridge, “having a good education or showing it in your writing”; Collins, “intelligent and well-educated”; Webster’s New World, “well-educated,” “showing extensive knowledge, learning, or culture.”

So one could defend the use of  “literate” by Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, in the Feb. 28, 2026, Times obituary. But we would have used “learned” or a similar word to avoid confusion with today’s general meaning of the adjective.

As for its etymology, “literate” originally meant “acquainted with letters or literature; erudite, learned, lettered,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s earliest citation refers to “a c. childer litterate” (“a hundred literate children”). From Polychronicon, John Trevisa’s translation, sometime before 1387, of an earlier 14th-century work by Ranulf Higden.

In the early 17th century, Oxford says, “literate” took on its “weakened” use—“able to read and write”—which is “now the usual sense.”

The dictionary’s first citation, which we’ve expanded, is from The Description of Penbrokshire, by George Owen of Henllys, Lord of Kemes (composed in 1602-1603 and first published in 1892):

“to indorse the wittnesses names on the backe of the deede, and this to be done by the wittnesses themselves, if they were literate; otherwise by some clerke or other for them.”

The OED describes this sense of “literate” as “opposed to illiterate,” which had appeared a half-century earlier. The two terms are derived from the Latin litteratus  (lettered, learned) and illiteratus (unlettered, unlearned).

Here’s the dictionary’s earliest “illiterate” citation: “No more can Iudgis, Illitturate Discus ane mater” (“No more can illiterate judges discuss [adjudicate] any matter”). From Ane Compendious and Breue Tractate (1556), a tract by the Church of Scotland minister William Lauder on the duty of kings, pastors, and judges.

Getting back to “literate,” the adjective took on a new sense in the 20th century: “competent or knowledgeable in a particular area,” such as as “politically literate,” “culturally literate,” or “computer literate.”

The first example in the OED for this sense is from a US newspaper: “The American people were busy becoming ‘politically literate’; that is, learning how to run their political system” (Boston Daily Globe, March 23, 1919).

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “computer literate” is from a 1961 lecture by the British novelist and chemist C. P. Snow about the danger of relying on computers and computer adepts to make decisions:

“It is going to take a major effort to make all scientific administrators computer-literate. It is going to be quite impossible within foreseeable time to make nonscientific administrators computer-literate.” From a report in Technology Review (July 1961) on “Men and Machines,” a conference at MIT.

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Q: In Jen Beagin’s 2023 novel Big Swiss, Flavia asks Om, her sex therapist, whether “adult” and “adultery” are related. He says they aren’t. Huh? Could that be right?

 A: Yes. Both English words ultimately come from different classical Latin sources: “adult” from adultus (full-grown, mature), and “adultery” from adulterare (to commit adultery, debase, counterfeit, or corrupt).

The first of these terms to appear in English, “adultery,” was recorded in the early 14th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest OED citation is from a statute, dated sometime before 1325, in A Middle English Statute-Book (2011), edited by Claire Fennell:

“Ant te womman, ȝif heo mide hire oune wille forsok hire hosebonde, ant tuuelde in hire aduoterie, a sal lusen aremanaund accion to purchasen hire dowere of þe tenement of þe foreseide man þat was hire lord.”

(“And the woman, if she of her own free will forsook her husband and lived in adultery, she shall lose forever the right of action to claim her dower [a widow’s share of her husband’s estate] from the holding of the aforementioned man who was her lord.”)

The earliest Oxford citation for the adjective “adult” is from a treatise on how to train statesmen: “Soche persons, beinge nowe adulte, that is to saye, passed theyr childehode” (The Boke Named the Gouernour, 1531, by the English scholar and diplomat Thomas Elyot).

The noun “adult” appeared a century later. The OED example is a from a treatise critical of Anabaptism, the doctrine that baptism should be administered only to believing adults.

In this passage from Anabaptism Routed (1655), John Reading argues that being baptized as a baby provides a stronger Christian foundation than later baptism:

“In the adult, coming to the knowledge of God’s covenant in Christ, and of his own feeling in infancy, it must make him more confident of his implantation into Christ, then if he knew that he never had been baptized.”

To get back to your question, no, “adult” and “adultery” are not related, but only the former can commit the latter.

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