Buzz
Gh seems like an odd way for a word to begin in English. There are only a small number of commonly used words that start with this combination. Apart from the spectral trio of ghost, ghastly, and ghoul, there are borrowed terms like ghetto, gherkin, and ghee, along with place names such as Ghana and Ghent—and that’s nearly the extent of it. This might leave you asking: What’s the deal with gh? Well, it turns out it has roots in a 15th-century publisher's influence.
The word ghoul made its way into English in the 1700s from the Arabic ghul (which means “shape-shifting desert demon, monster,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary), but initially, it appeared without the h, spelled goul or goule. It was later drawn into the gh group because of its connection to the word ghost.
But how did ghost come to be spelled with gh? Among the gh words, ghost is the most frequent and has the longest history, dating back to Old English gást. For centuries, up until the 1500s, it was written in various forms like gast, gæst, gost, goste, goost, and goist. The word ghastly—from the related Middle English gastliche—also appeared without the h before the 1500s.
The addition of the h in ghost and ghastly can be traced back to William Caxton, the man who introduced the printing press to England in the 1470s. After setting up his first press in Bruges, he brought Flemish typesetters with him when he returned to establish his business in Westminster. In his book Spell It Out, linguist David Crystal writes that “in Bruges they would all have been used to reading manuscripts in Flemish spelling. So if a word reminded them of its Flemish counterpart, why not spell it that way? The boss wouldn’t mind, as long as the words were intelligible. He had more to worry about than spelling.”
The typesetters also used gh in their spellings of words like goose, goat, and girl, but these spellings never gained traction. For some reason, only ghost and ghastly retained the h. Perhaps it was because these words seemed more eerie that way. Imagine a tale of the ghost of a “ghoos ghoot gherle”—that sounds downright terrifying. Thank ghoodness those spellings have ghone.
