Ye Olde Thorn

The Letter You Never Knew You Were Mispronouncing

James Sharpe
5 min readApr 1, 2024

You’ve likely seen those old English pubs or shops with names like “Ye Olde Shoppe.” Like most people, you probably read it aloud, “Yee Old Shop,” or, “Ye Oldey Shoppey.” But did you know the first letter in “ye” isn’t pronounced like a “y”? That’s because it isn’t a “y” at all, but a “th”! (And doesn’t that make more sense? “The Old Shop” is a perfectly reasonable name for a store).

Ye Olde London pub

Then why was it written with a Y in the first place? Ancient letters/runes, the printing press, and old fashioned laziness are what got us here.

Earlier versions of the English language had about 10 more letters than we have now. That might seem strange, or unnecessary (aren’t we able to get by just fine with the 26 we have now?), but this will be the first of many times I’ll write this: specific letters don’t need to exist, and words don’t need to be written the way they are — only sounds are essential. The scratch marks we make on paper is just a not-so-secret code we’re all in on. But anyway, back to the alphabet!

Modern English has always had this “th” sound, but we haven’t always written it the same way. Originally, it was written with one letter, called “thorn”, written like so: Þ, or þ.

This “th” sound is represented in the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA) as θ, called theta. The IPA (not a beer) is a huge collection of letters that don’t correspond to any specific language, but rather to sounds. This theta sound is the th in the words thing or thin. This sound is called a “voiceless dental fricative”. That is to say, it is:

  • Dental — the tip of the tongue sits between the teeth.
  • Fricative — the air flows out of the mouth like in “sha”, “za”, “va” —
    it doesn’t stop suddenly, as in “ga”, “ka”, “ba”, “da”.
  • Voiceless — The vocal cords are not used to produce the sound.

Try it: “th”, “thick” — Touch your throat at your vocal cords and say the word slowly. Note that the vocal cords only “turn on” (i.e. you can feel vibrations) for the vowel “i” in the word, “thick”. Compare the word, “this”, where the vocal cords are active for the “th”.

So, about the word, “the”? Why is the first syllable voiced?

Well, the word, “the contains not the θ sound, theta (which was written in English as thorn, þ), but the ð sound, called “eth” (which was also written in English as eth, ð). However, in earlier times, writers confused ð and þ so much that they became interchangeable in practical use.

Here’s a cheat-sheet to see it all in one place

Thus, the word, “the”, was written as “þe” (still pronounced the same of course). The Norman Conquest of England (that is, the French) had forced England to go bi-lingual for a while, hence all the Romance language vocabulary English has. I’m not 100% certain on this, but it looks like it was the French who started writing “th” for þ, because they did not have that sound in their language but they knew the Greek, theta, did.

(Bonus points if you already knew: The French commonly commit something called Th-alveolarization when they try to make the English “th” sound — that is, the tongue doesn’t make it all the way to the teeth, but rather stops on that ridge right behind the teeth, making an unvoiced “s” or a voiced “z”. Zis sing is why zee French have zis acceɲt — their mouths grew up never once producing those sounds. In turn, some sounds that their mouths easily make that we struggle mightily with: ɥ, œ, ʁ, ɲ, and ʒ).

Meanwhile, in the rest of Europe, the printing press had just been developed. Germany, France, and Italy were not printing thorn. Every letter cost money and took time to move around the typeset, so it became a great shortcut to just use the letter, “Y”… which if you squint your eyes, kind of looks like þ.

Scribes began using this “Y” shortcut in their written script as well. “, or the letter thorn with an “e” above it, was shorthand for “the”. A letter “t” above was shorthand for “that”, both of which are seen in this text below from The Book of Margery Kempe.

By Margery Kempe — The Book of Margery Kempe, Chapter 18 (excerpt), Public Domain

The “ye” for “the” stuck, and we’ve been left with cutesy remenants in the way of “Ye Olde Shoppe” ever since. But now you know — just say, “The.”

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James Sharpe
James Sharpe

Written by James Sharpe

A place to record occasional thoughts, write travel journals, and explore the human condition with short fiction.

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