The Missing Letters of the Alphabet: Thorn, Wynn and More

The alphabet is one of the first things we learn as children, and its 26 letters feel as fixed as anything in the language. But English has used more letters than that. Some disappeared hundreds of years ago, some survive in other languages, and one is hiding in plain sight on every “Ye Olde” pub sign. These are the missing letters of the alphabet: the ones English lost along the way. If you want the opposite story, of letters English gained, my post on the last letter added to the alphabet tells how J and U arrived.

The lost letters at a glance

The first four came from runes or from the scribes of Old English, the next two from Latin, and the last two were never quite full letters at all.

Thorn, and the truth about “ye olde”

Thorn (þ) is the most famous lost letter, and it is still hiding in plain sight. It came from the runic alphabet used by the Anglo-Saxons and made the “th” sound, as in “thin” or “this”. Thorn stayed in use long after the Norman Conquest, through most of the Middle English period, according to Wikipedia. Then printing arrived. The type sets brought to England by William Caxton and his contemporaries came from the Low Countries and had no thorn, so printers substituted the letter that looked most like it, y, as Wikipedia’s article on “ye olde” explains.

That is why “the” was printed as “ye”, even in the first edition of the King James Bible in 1611. So “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe” should really be read “The Old Tea Shop”. The “ye” was only ever a printer’s stand-in for thorn. Thorn still survives in Icelandic, the only living language to keep it.

Eth: thorn’s little sibling

Eth (ð) also made a “th” sound. Today, it is often said that thorn was for the soft “th” in “thin” and eth for the buzzier “th” in “this”, but, as Mental Floss notes, the evidence suggests Old English made no such distinction; scribes used the two letters interchangeably, even within the same manuscript. Eth fell out of use earlier than thorn, and both were eventually replaced by the two-letter “th” we use now. Like thorn, eth lives on in Icelandic.

Wynn and yogh: sounds that needed new letters

Latin, the alphabet the Anglo-Saxons adopted, had no letter for the “w” sound. Early scribes wrote it as a double u, then borrowed a rune called wynn (ƿ) instead. After the Norman Conquest, scribes brought the double u back, and by about 1300 it had replaced wynn entirely, as Grammarphobia explains, citing the Oxford English Dictionary. Yogh (ȝ) did a similar job for a throaty sound, like the ch in the Scottish “loch”, and in some words for a y sound. As English changed, yogh gave way to “gh”, which is why so many “gh” spellings are now silent, as in “though” and “daughter”, or sound like an f, as in “laugh”.

Ash and ethel: letters from Latin

Ash (æ) is two letters joined together, a and e. Old English used it, under the name æsc after a runic letter, for the vowel sound in “cat”, Mental Floss explains. It later dropped out of everyday English, although it still appears in some old-fashioned spellings such as mediæval and encyclopædia, and it is a full letter in Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic today. Ethel (œ), a joined o and e, represented a vowel somewhere between the two. Like ash, it survives mainly in older or very formal spellings, such as fœtus and œsophagus, the forms behind the shorter spellings we use today.

Long s: not a separate letter, but close

If you have ever looked at an old document, such as the original US Bill of Rights or a first edition of Paradise Lost, and wondered why it says “Congreſs”, you have met the long s (ſ). It was not a different sound, just a second lowercase form of s that started in Roman handwriting. Printers followed set rules for it: for example, it was not used at the end of a word, so “success” became “ſucceſs”, as Live Science explains. Because it looks so much like an f, it caused endless misreadings. The London printer John Bell is often credited with its demise, after dropping it from his British Theatre editions in 1791, and The Times of London switched to the short s with its issue of 10 September 1803, according to Wikipedia. By the 1820s it had all but disappeared from English printing.

Ampersand: the 27th letter

The ampersand (&) began as a joined-up way of writing et, the Latin word for “and”. For a time, schoolchildren recited it at the end of the alphabet, finishing with “and per se and”, meaning roughly “and, by itself, and”. Run together, that phrase became the word ampersand, and some places kept & in the recited alphabet until the mid-1800s. It never really counted as a letter like A or B, but it is the only one on this list we still use every day.

Why so many letters disappeared

There was no single moment when these letters were cut. Most faded out for practical reasons. The Norman Conquest brought French-trained scribes who preferred Latin letters and their own spelling habits, and printing finished the job, because the type sets imported from Europe simply did not include English oddities such as thorn, eth and yogh. Combinations of existing letters, such as th, gh and w, were easier to set in type, and over time they became the standard. The result is an alphabet that is tidier but a little less precise, with “th” now doing the job of two old letters and “gh” covering several sounds, some of them silent.

I find it oddly comforting that the alphabet we treat as permanent has changed so much, losing letters as well as gaining them, as I found when I looked into the last letter added to the alphabet. English vocabulary has been just as restless, as I discovered in the words Shakespeare supposedly invented. And next time you walk past a “Ye Olde” sign, you will know you are looking at a ghost of thorn.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Thorn (letter)
• Wikipedia: Ye olde
• Mental Floss: 12 letters that didn’t make the alphabet
• Grammarphobia: Double u
• Live Science: The long s in old texts
• Wikipedia: Long s