PILL “The word pill ultimately comes from the Latin pila “ball,” or more specifically from the Medieval Latin pilula “little ball.” So a pill is a small ball or pellet of medicine. This is the earliest sense of the word in English, dating to before 1400, appearing in the English translation of Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie in Bodleian Ashmole MS 1396”
ALE/BEER “Ale and beer are both words that go back to Old English. Today, we distinguish the two as different beverages, but this distinction did not exist in Old English.”
BACHELOR “The English word bachelor comes from the Old French bacheler, meaning a “young man.” The word ultimately comes from Latin *baccalaris (the asterisk designated a root that has been reconstructed but is not found in extant literature).”
BIKINI “test of an atomic weapon at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Bikini was the site for numerous nuclear weapons tests through 1958. Four days after this first test, fashion designer Jacques Heim exhibited a two-piece swimsuit which he dubbed the bikini in an attempt to ride the publicity wave created by the well-publicized detonation.”
CHOW “This term for food is a clipping of the older chow-chow, a Chinese-English pidgin word of unknown origin meaning food or, in particular, a mixture or medley of foodstuffs.”
CURFEW “The word curfew originates in the medieval practice of ringing a bell at a fixed time in the evening as an order to bank the hearths and prepare for sleep. It comes from the Anglo-Norman coeverfu, the equivalent of the Old French cuevre-fe, or cover fire.”
EUREKA “This exclamation is from the Greek heureka, meaning I have found it.”
GOLF “Despite the claims of some that the name of this game is an acronym, its origin is unknown. The place of origin, however, is known and it should come as no surprise that the game comes from Scotland. The earliest known reference to golf is from 1457 in the Acts of James II of Scotland, where it is banned.”HELL “Hell is another Old English word. It is attested to in the early ninth century, but the word and the concept is undoubtedly older, dating back to pre-Christian Germanic mythology. In Norse mythology, Hel was the goddess of the underworld”
HOOLIGAN “Hooligan is a variant of the Irish name Houlihan or O hUallachain, and somewhere along the line some street tough of that name left it for posterity. But the specific person whom the term originally referred to has been lost to the ages.”
Wilton, Dave. (2011, Oct 9) Retrieved from http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php
| Phonetic | Semantic | Etymological |
| Bat | Align/alignment | Boutique (French) |
| fed | Forgive/forgiven | Edifice(Latin) |
| go | Corrupt/corruption | Animal (Latin) |
| kit | Design/designer | Angst (German) |
| Send | Origin/original | Demagogue (Greek) |
8. Words that end in ch and tch
| -ch | -tch | ||
| Reach | catch | ||
| rich | match | ||
| beach | watch | ||
| speech | Switch | ||
| search | stretch | ||
| lurch | pitch | ||
| march | fetch | ||
| leech | scratch | ||
| Beseech | patch | ||
| teach | stitch | ||
| much | hatch | ||
| torch | clutch | ||
It appears that the –ch follows a long vowel sound such as the sound made by the –ea and –ee. It is likely that the transfer from a long vowel to a fricative –ch is easier than transfer to a –tch because the t will be lost following a longer vowel. Whereas the short vowel sound made by the a in catch and the e in stretch allows the mouth to form the fricative –tch more easily, thus the reason why these words are spelled with a –tch.
| -ge | -dge |
| age | fridge |
| allege | fledge |
| anchorage | ridge |
| beige | badge |
| plunge | judge |
| engage | Fudge |
I believe that the –ge and –dge distinctions are much more difficult to figure out. After analysis of the words, I was unable to discern a reasonable pattern that distinguishes between the two. At first it appeared that the –dge ending only appeared with words that had a first letter that required a stop, or a restriction of airflow. However, the word beige which ends in a –ge ruined that generalization. Overll, I found that my pronunciation in normal speech blended the d in the -dge endings and made them sound exactly the same as those that ended in just a –ge. This makes me hesitant to apply a single spelling rule to these two endings.
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