Argument

The usual rule when adding the suffix –ment to verbs ending in <e> is that the <e> is retained; this is what we find in words like placement, movement, achievement.  However, argument differs in dropping the <e>.  Because of this, arguement is a common misspelling of this word, one which some people think should be accepted as a valid alternative.  The website arguement.net deliberately adopts the misspelling, defending its choice on the grounds that misspellings like this are ‘so benign that usually they serve only as a criticizing point for people who can't argue arguments, but are switching their focus to these “fundamental” flaws in your character’. 

There is also an emerging view that arguement is a legitimate alternative in British English, similar to the case of judgement and judgment, where both spellings are acceptable.  Urban Dictionary defines arguement as: ‘The alternate spelling of the word argument in British English’.  A similar view was offered on Yahoo answers in a discussion prompted by a user’s request for the correct spelling of argument, in which one respondent claimed that argument is American usage and arguement the correct British spelling.  This answer was contradicted by the subsequent reply, which identified the correct spelling, but for the wrong reason: ‘When you add a suffix to a word that has an e at the end you almost always drop the e’.  All of which goes to show that if you want the correct spelling of a word, it’s better to look in a dictionary than on the Internet.

ghost

This word is derived from Old English gast, which in Middle English became gost.  The ghost spelling is thought to have been adopted in the fifteenth century from the Middle Dutch spelling gheest by the earliest printers and compositors who were originally from the Low Countries.  Its first appearance is in texts printed by William Caxton, but it only became common in the middle of the sixteenth century.  It is one of small number of <gh> spellings that appeared in the sixteenth century, like ghest ‘guest’ ghoos ‘goose’, gherle ‘girl’, most of which no longer survive.  The <gh> spelling was subsequently adopted in the spelling of related words, such as ghastly.  This word is etymologically related to ghost; its earliest spellings are therefore without an <h>.  The earliest example of the spelling ghastly is found in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene; it was probably Spenser’s use of this spelling that ensured its wider adoption.  It may be that the preservation of the <gh> in ghastly, ghost and aghast, is due to their shared sense of ‘fear’ or ‘shock’.  While this is a tempting theory, we should also note the existence of a number of counterexamples, such as gherkin, that have the <gh> spelling but don’t share the same semantic component (unless it’s possible to be afraid of a gherkin).  Gherkin is also a Dutch borrowing, although the Dutch form gerken doesn’t have the <gh>; the earliest English appearance of the word, Samuel Pepys’s record of his first encounter with this exotic delicacy, is spelled girkin. 

Twelfth

The number of references I’ve come across to ‘twelth’ night recently has prompted me to investigate the spelling of this word.  It derives from the Old English word for twelve: twelf, which is a compound of the words ‘two’ and ‘leave’, meaning ‘two left’ (after you’ve taken away ten).  Forms of twelve derived in this manner are common to the Germanic languages (compare German zwölf); other Indo-European languages generally employ the formation ‘two’ followed by ‘ten’ (as in Latin duodecem).  This is the origin of subsequent ordinal numbers in English: thirteen, fourteen and so on.  In Old English twelve was spelled twelfta, from which later spellings such as twelft, twelt and twalt emerged.  These forms survived into the seventeenth century in northern dialects and in Scotland, where an alternative spelling twelf is also recorded.  Our standard spelling is derived from a southern variant in which the -th ending was added to Old English twelfta by comparison with other ordinal numbers like fourth, fifth, sixth.  This form became common in the southern dialects of Middle English, alongside a variant spelling twelth.  Twelth continued to appear in printed texts up to the eighteenth century and is found in the works of distinguished writers such as Ben Jonson, showing that our modern misspelling has a long and illustrious pedigree.  

Today the spelling twelth is in widespread use online, often on supposedly authoritative sites. It is a common  error in references to Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night: the BBC’s Learning Zone offers clips from an animated version of Twelth Night, while numerous school websites advertise productions with the misspelling.  Students researching an essay on the play should be especially wary of sites offering study guides to Twelth Night.  Ironically, the spelling adopted for the title of this play in the First Folio edition of 1623 was Twelfe.  Such errors would send a shiver down the spines of the librarians responsible for the Typo of the Day website who, paraphrasing Malvolio’s line ‘some have greatness thrust upon them’, warn that ‘a missing “f” ushers no one to greatness’.  Not everyone would agree.  There is a Facebook group dedicated to changing the spelling of the word twelfth to twelth, on the grounds that most people already spell it that way, and that it is difficult to pronounce the ‘fth’ without spitting.  A similar distaste for the word twelfth is encapsulated in the definition offered by Urban Dictionary, which labels it the ugliest word in the English language and urges its readers to avoid it completely: ‘Just don’t say twelfth. It’s disgusting.’