Guest-mudgeon Silvio says
I tend to be a pronunciation curmudgeon, and
here's one of my favorite (or should I say least favorite!) pronunciation peeves. Have you ever heard anyone say
heighth as in "length, width, and heighth"? At first I thought it was just rushed
speaking, where you would keep the -th ending in this sequence, but I
started to hear it more and more from different people, and they would repeat this pronunciation time and again.
Hmm... while we would never
stoop to saying heighth ourselves, we should point out that this is
a pretty well established pronunciation. The earliest form of height
was the Old English hiehtho and in Middle English it was heyeth.
By Shakespeare's day it had become heythe and heighth was
common until the 19th century when educated usage began to favor height.
In the old dialect of Gloucester it was hecth.
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