Great Vowel Shift
English sound transformation
The Great Vowel Shift was a major change in English pronunciation between roughly 1400 and 1700, during which long vowels moved upward in the mouth.
Words like "bite" and "house" once rhymed with "beet" and "goose." The shift explains why English spelling often seems divorced from pronunciation—spellings were largely fixed before the sounds finished changing.
Language between 1100-1500
- Early Modern EnglishTransitional historical language phase
- etymologyWord origin study
- diachronicConcerning change over time
- language changeHow speech transforms over time
Chaucer · Shakespeare · standardization · orthography · lexicography · reconstruction · dialectology · morphology
Correct letter sequence
- silent lettersSpelled but not voiced
- irregularityDeparture from standard
- standardizationImplementing uniform technical specifications
- accentRegional speech pattern
speech patterns · reading aloud · regional variation · elocution · articulation · enunciation
Diphthong reduction to singleton
- historical phonologyStudy of sound changes
- drag chainGrounding device using links
- tensingMaking or becoming taut
Middle English
Language between 1100-1500
- Early Modern EnglishTransitional historical language phase
- etymologyWord origin study
- diachronicConcerning change over time
language change · Chaucer · Shakespeare · standardization · orthography · lexicography · reconstruction · dialectology · morphology · written record
spelling
Correct letter sequence
- silent lettersSpelled but not voiced
- irregularityDeparture from standard
- standardizationImplementing uniform technical specifications
accent · speech patterns · reading aloud · regional variation · elocution · articulation · enunciation
monophthongization
Diphthong reduction to singleton
- historical phonologyStudy of sound changes
- drag chainGrounding device using links
- tensingMaking or becoming taut
- etymologyword origins, word history, word origin, etymon, root words
- linguisticslinguistics, phoneme, phonemes, morpheme, morphemes
- historical linguisticslanguage families, cognates, proto-languages, proto-language, Indo-European
- language changelanguage change, linguistic diffusion, loan words, creolization, pidginization
- Middle Englishanon, betwixt, doth, eke, ere
- Sound Changeablaut, umlaut, nasalization, denasalization, voicing