You already know what a ghost is. So instead of the meaning, in this WOTW (as no one calls it), I’m looking at that silent ‘h’ nestled between the ‘g’ and ‘o’. It hasn’t always been there – back in the 16th century, the word was spelled ‘gost’, as it comes from an Old English word, ‘gást’ (other spellings included gæst – ooh, I do love a ligature – goost, goist and goste). So how did the ‘h’ sneak in?
BOO! This picture is genuinely a bit unsettling, sorry. (Oh, and it’s by Syarafina Yusof on Unsplash.)
Well, we can blame this on William Caxton, the dude who introduced the printing press to us Brits in 1476. His first press was in Bruges (great film), and when he came back to Blighty to set up shop he brought some Flemish typesetters with him. One of them was called Wynkyn de Worde which is (a) an awesome name and (b) a nice case of nominative determinism (when your name matches your job). It seems that Caxton didn’t give a flying whatsit about spelling (gasp!), so largely left de Worde and his posse to it when they were typesetting English works. So if they came across a word that looked like a Flemish one, they tended to just use the Flemish version (because, why not?). And the Flemish word for ‘ghost’ was ‘gheest’. All of which means that they stuck an ‘h’ in our ‘gost’ whenever they typeset it. They did the same with ‘gastly’ and ‘agast’. Apparently they also tried it with ‘goat’, ‘goose’ and ‘girl’ but lucky for us, and small children trying to learn written English everywhere, those didn’t stick.
(I shamelessly stole this story from Susie Dent on Countdown, so thanks Suze.)