Word of the week: Indict

I’m not going to speculate, lament, or gloat.

Queens Daily Eagle, March 30, 2023

 

I am, however, going to muse about why we pronounce indict the way we do—rhyming with delight and extradite—and not the way we pronounce its etymological cousins predict, edict, verdict, and contradict.* After all, they share a -dict.

 

Indications are that someone was confused. (Via @BCDreyer, March 30, 2023)

 

We pronounce indict that way because for 300 years it was spelled endite. Here’s Merriam-Webster with an explainer:

The word indict is spelled I-N-D-I-C-T, but why is the C silent? Other legal terms in English, that come from the same Latin root, dicere, which means to say, have C's that we actually hear. Words like edict, interdict, and verdict. Indict means to formally decide that someone should be put on trial for a crime. It comes from the Latin word that means to proclaim. We pronounce it indict because its original spelling in English was E-N-D-I-T-E, a spelling that was used for 300 years before scholars decided to make it look more like its Latin root word, indictare. Our pronunciation, however, still reflects the original English spelling. This after-the-fact correction of spellings, based on Latin, is also why there's a B in the words debt, doubt, plumber, and subtle, and a silent S in island.

Why did it used to be spelled endite? Because that’s how it was spelled in French, and post–Norman Invasion English borrowed many legal terms from the new overlords. The first indict spelling, according to the OED, appeared in Use of Law, published in 1629.

Who incited the indict spelling? Latin-loving snobs, mostly. In a 2015 column for The Week, James Harbeck wrote about the influence of Renaissance classicists:

When the English language rolled into the Renaissance in the 1500s, the pronunciation had shifted away from the spelling in many ways, and the spelling had gotten extra twists from people such as French clerks and Dutch typesetters. Dictionaries didn’t exist yet, so there was no solid reference for people to follow. So what did the bright minds of the time do? They fixed some of the spelling.

Unfortunately, the way they fixed it was to try to make the words show their classical roots. Many words that came from Latin — or that they thought had come from Latin — got extra silent letters just to show their glorious classical origins. So det, which could be traced back to debitum, got the b stuffed in just as a schoolmasterish rap on the knuckles. Iland, which actually came from an Old English word, was mistakenly thought to come from Latin insula and so an s was erroneously stuffed in.

Words such as receipt, indict, and victual (“vittle”) also got their forms from the same “reform.”

Are you now wondering whether addict is related to the other -dicts? It is! In Roman law, to addict meant “to deliver or hand over formally (a person or thing) in accordance with a judicial decision.” When the word migrated into English in the 1500s, that meaning was retained and the accent fell on the second syllable. Addict could also mean “to devote oneself to a subject or occupation.” It wasn’t until the very late 19th century that the noun addict, accent on the first syllable, appeared in print, with the meaning we know now: a person affected by an addiction to a drug or other psychoactive substance.

I can’t let this go without saying a little requiem for Herdict, which I first wrote about in 2009. Herdict was a project of Jonathan Zittrain and colleagues at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center; it “collected and disseminated real-­time, crowdsourced information about Internet filtering, denial of service attacks, and other blockages.” A worthy goal; a terrible name. Herdict was a portmanteau—let’s be real, a shitmanteau—of herd and verdict, and it was pronounced, more or less, “her dick.” The project ended in 2019; a successor project, Amberlink, has a far more felicitous name.

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* If we have contradict, shouldn’t we have prodict—to agree or confirm—as well? Apparently not, although I did find a product dictionary called PRODICT. (Get it? It’s a portmanteau.) But no trademark filings for PRODICT! 

Comments

[James Asher]

Very…🤔 um…insictful, indeed! 😉

[Chad Orleman]

Love learning etymology. Thanks for this!

[Nick W]

I always thought Americanization of the English language eliminated useless letters, like the “u” in labour or colour, or the “gh” in night to “nite”. Still work to do I guess.

[John Lawson]

I think the Americanization of English owes something to a spat between Webster and Johnson. Webster wanted to make American English distinct and he also sought to eliminate unneeded letters as in labor and color. That may simply be an urban myth - not sure.

[Nancy Friedman]

John and Nick: Noah Webster's interest in spelling reform had more to do with logic (or "logic") and aesthetics than patriotism. Merriam-Webster has a good summary:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/about-us/spelling-reform
His record was mixed:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/noah-websters-spelling-wins-and-fails