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The Curious Spelling of <bought>

Words! Literacy Club is copyright © Lesley Catterall 2003-2007 All rights reserved.

English is full of words that have interesting and unusual spellings, but as any real speller knows there is a reason for every spelling. So what is the reason for this one?

The question of how the past tense and participle of <buy> has come to be spelled as <bought> is one that is frequently asked by many of my younger students. Only recently I discovered <buy> on a 2nd Grade Dolch Sight Word List (aargh!!) and was later informed that both <buy> and <bought> are common inclusions in other spelling lists. As all my students know, the only lists I find of value are reference ones (as you find in dictionaries) and shopping ones (because I have such a bad memory.) All other lists are an abomination and should be treated by children and parents alike as indicators of teacher ignorance.

The spelling of <bought> is no more curious than the past tenses and participles of other verbs of Old English origin: <bring>, <fight>, <seek>, <owe>, <teach>, <think> and the odd one of Latin origin <catch>

More curious is the spelling of <buy> itself, which uses a rare digraph <uy> to represent the phoneme / ai /. The only other word I know of that uses this digraph in English is <guy>, but that is another story. 

What was curious was that very little is written about these words and the spellings that are so often claimed to be irregular. So I set off on an etymological investigation in to the origins of the words to see if this helped me to a greater understanding.

Old English words were of Germanic origin and as such followed the Germanic rules of inflection. The table below shows each of the words with their Old English root (except for <catch> for more on that see inset). In two cases I have found Modern German equivalents to compare with the Old English: bringen (bring) and denken (think). In both you can see the spelling changes that take place to form the past tense and the past participle of the verbs.

An Investigation into Old English

These have evolved over time to the very regular spelling pattern we now have in English of:

 ? + < vowel + ugh > + < t >

Where the ? represents a consonant or consonant string.

This combination of vowel plus the trigraph <ugh> plus the single letter grapheme <t> is a spelling that is used to represent the pronunciation [ כ:t ] and does so quite regularly in all our example words.

Melvyn Ramsden’s Kit 6 Theme I “The grapheme <ugh>: the full story” from the Tool Box goes into more detail on this very useful Old English trigraph.

What is important to know is that the only vowels that can precede <ugh> are the letters <o> and <a>. Making the spelling pattern even simpler to use.

When to use which is determined by etymological indicators in the parent verb such as the presence of the letter <a> in the spelling of <teach> and <catch> and the absence from any of the other parents.

I wanted to know more about <ought> (or <aught> depending on your dictionary). All my dictionaries told me that <ought> came from the Old English āhte past tense of āgan ‘to owe’ and yet we no longer use these words together in the same sense.