Mistaken for kin

The Old English word was īgland — īeg, “island,” plus land. It had no s, and no connection to isle, which arrived separately from Latin insula by way of French. In the sixteenth century, spellers who saw isle sitting beside iland assumed the two must be related, and wrote the s into island to match. The silent letter is a footprint of the mistake: it marks the exact spot where someone saw a kinship that was not there.

From Old French outrage, built on outre — “beyond” — from Latin ultra, plus the ordinary noun-ending -age. At root it names the state of going past the bounds; it contains neither out nor rage. The word arrived in English about excess of any kind, and only narrowed toward fury because rage was sitting there in the spelling, telling readers what the word had to be about.

A belfry was a berfrey — from Old French, in turn from a Germanic bergfrid, a “protective shelter,” the movable wooden siege tower wheeled up to a castle wall. It had no bell. But watchtowers tended to hold an alarm bell, so English speakers decided the word must be about bells and reshaped the first r into an l to suit. The bell walked into the word after the fact and stayed.

From Old French crevice (modern écrevisse), from a Germanic word meaning, near enough, little crab. It is a crustacean; it is not a fish, and never was one inside the word. When the unfamiliar second syllable reached English ears it was heard as -fish, and the spelling obliged. The animal is misclassified in its own name.

From the Spanish cucaracha, carried into English in the early 1600s and at once broken into two English words it had nothing to do with — a rooster and a small freshwater fish. Neither is anywhere in the Spanish. The insect was renamed out of parts already lying around in the language, which is how a borrowed word disappears into English: it gets reassembled from the familiar.

From Middle English pentis, from Old French apentis, from a Latin word for an appendage — a lean-to or shed with a sloping roof tacked onto a larger building. No house, and no pent. By about 1530 it had been reshaped toward house and a French word for slope; the rooftop-luxury sense is a twentieth-century arrival. Middle English even called the stable of the Nativity a penthouse, back when the word still meant a shed.

The Old English was brýdguma — bride plus guma, a plain word for man (the same root, far back, as Latin homo). Guma died out. By the time it had worn down to -gome, no one recognized it, and they had a perfectly good word for a young male servant — groom — so they swapped it in. The groom in bridegroom was never a groom. He was a man whose word for himself went extinct.

Originally shamefast, from Old English scamfæst — held fast by shame, the way one is steadfast or colorfast. The -fast meant fixed, bound, firm. When that sense of -fast faded, -faced moved in, helped along by the reasonable-sounding notion that shame shows in the face. The word now seems to describe an expression. It used to describe a hold.

From Old English angnægl. The ang- meant painful, tight — the same root behind anguish, anger, and angst — and the nægl was the iron kind, a nail you hammer, its hard head likened to a sore patch of skin. Nothing hangs. By the 1500s the painful ang- had been overwritten with hang, and the iron nail quietly reassigned to the fingernail it sits beside.

From Old French femelle, from Latin femella, a little femina — woman. Male is from a wholly separate Latin word, masculus. They are not a pair and were never built from each other. But the two rhymed and named matching things, so English bent the spelling of femelle toward male to make the resemblance honest. The symmetry the spelling promises is a thing the spelling invented.

It means harmful, and then foul-smelling. The noy in it is a worn-down annoy (Old French anoier) — nothing to do with noise, a separate word entirely. A noisome smell is an annoying, hurtful one, not a loud one. The two words have drifted close enough in sound that the wrong one now does the explaining.

From Old French soverain, from a Latin word built on super — over, above. The g it now carries is silent and unearned: it was drawn into the spelling by reign, a word it has no relation to (reign is from Latin regnum). A ruler reigns, so the word for the highest ruler seemed to deserve a reign inside it — and a letter was added to supply one.