The seven sounds of ‘ough’, and other joys of our mongrel language
Wednesday, 1 July 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: Cough should rhyme with tough. And with bough. And with through. And in most languages it would. But English is not most languages. English is an ancient mongrel and all the better for it.
A thousand years ago, before the printing press and even before paper, almost the only people who could write were monks in monasteries. Among the letters the monks had at their disposal when recording the young English language was the letter yogh. A yogh looked a bit like the number 3, or a handwritten z with its tail dropping below the line.
The yogh was a flexible beast. At the start of a word it could represent a y sound. At the end of a word it could represent a w sound. Most commonly it represented a sound similar to the ch in a Scottish loch, a noise like a hoick of phlegm. Back then the English language sounded Germanic.
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The word night would have been pronounced more or less nickt, and it would have been spelt ni yogh t. Then in the 1400s the first printing presses arrived in England, accompanied by Flemish printers who had never come across the yogh. To them it looked similar to the letters g and h combined, so that’s how they printed it. Thus the medieval ni yogh t became the modern night.
Once words were printed their spelling was more or less fixed. But their pronunciation was not, and between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the pronunciation of English underwent vast changes. Broadly, English lost a lot of its harsh Germanic quality by moving from the back of the mouth towards the front, a process known as the Great Vowel Shift.
Before the Great Vowel Shift the word daughter would have been spelt with a yogh in the middle and pronounced more or less like the modern German tochter. After the Great Vowel Shift the ch sound had moved forward in the mouth and softened to the w sound of today. But the spelling stayed the same. And thus the spelling and the pronunciation of English diverged. As a result it is now possible to pronounce the sequence ough in seven different ways.
Numerous meddlers have bemoaned English spelling. George Bernard Shaw, the Irish pacifist and socialist, proposed a 40-letter phonetic alphabet. It met with as much success as pacifism and socialism. Noah Webster, the American lexicographer, managed to knock the u out of colour and the ue off catalogue and to turn defence into defense, but otherwise had little influence.
There still exists, I believe, a Simplified Spelling Society, with a New Zealand branch about which, I am ashamed to say, I have failed to be rude for quite a few years. But that is mainly because I haven’t seen them stirring in the correspondence columns of the paper. Let them raise their heads again and I’ll not hesitate to fire.
For the English we speak and write is the product of a couple of thousand years of unfinished evolution. Spelling moors us to that past. When the poet Keats lay dying of tuberculosis at the age of 25 he didn’t cof up blood. He coughed it up.
Orwell too died of tuberculosis. But even as he coughed his way towards the grave he finished 1984, about a nightmare socialist dictatorship whose leaders took care to do two things. One was to erase history. The other was to emasculate the language.
Those who would simplify our spelling seek to do much the same. They’d reduce an ancient treasure house to phonetic pap for kindergarteners. Be off with them. Repeat after me, children, through, though, thorough, thought, bough, rough and cough.
This Sunday, July 5, at 3pm, Joe will be presenting Shakespeare’s Greatest Comedy as part of the Lyttelton Arts Festival. Tickets at laf.co.nz.