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"Heighth" Is Not a Word

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Another word I’ve grown to dislike: heighth. More accurately, it’s a non-standard pronunciation of “height” designed to make it vaguely rhyme with width and breadth. After all, shouldn’t the vertical equivalent to these also end with the “th” sound?

As it turns out, it once did. The obsolete spelling of height is highth and the obsolete pronunciation ends with the “th” sound. And by obsolete, I mean “went out of fashion in the 15th century.”

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2006
    You say “po-tay-toe” – I say “po-taw-toe”

    The beauty of a language like Spanish is that the words are “spelled” as they are “pronounced” Spanish Spelling Bees simply are not thrilling.

    English however is a mish-mash of many languages. Our language “tolerates” a wide variety of spelling rules – with an even wider variety of exceptions to those spelling rules.

    “I” before “E” except after “C” – or when sounding like “A” as in “neighbor” and “weigh” – with the exceptions being: weird, feint, foreign, leisure. Huh? You're OK with that?

    I doubt that you pronounce the “D” in Wednesday, or the first “R” in February –So to allow a particular pronunciation to bother you seems kinda petty.
  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2006
    You're making two arguments: whether English is consistent in its spelling rules and pronunciation rules (it's not) and whether I should get bothered by a non-standard pronunciation. For the former, I don't care. For the latter, it's my pet peeve and I'll be peeved if I want to. ;-)
  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2006
    Wouldn't you spell it "heith"?  You'd have a better argument for it not being a word.

    Here, how about "heith ain't a wurd"... ain't wasn't a word once upon a time, but now has official status because it is in the dictionary.

    Frankly, any phonetic sounds that communicate a meaning is a word, it just might not be an "official" word.  Or rather, it might not be an official word yet.

    English is a living language, and it evolves.  As much as that may annoy traditionalists, it is a fact that you can't prevent it.  Otherwise, we would still all be using words that fell out of fashion 500 years ago.
  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2006
    I think if you're looking for a vertical equivalent to breadth and width you would be best off with depth.
  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2006
    Depth is the Z axis -- different thing.
  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    April 23, 2006
    After my previous posts on language where several commenters pointed out that language is an evolving...