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 zwรถlf); 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.’
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