This has bothered me for years and pops into my head here and there. Whenever I see the word triple my brain says it like the word “tripe” (the stomach of a cow that people eat)
Am I missing some rule that is used when it comes to spelling? Why is it Nipple and not Niple
Why no Tripple?
In: 5590
One of the reasons has to do with pronunciation. believe it or not, spellings sometimes were meant to help guide pronunciation. Triple is a French loan word and was spelled the same way in French. In English, a consonant is often doubled to avoid mispronouncing the preceding vowel (in this case the i ) as a long sound, in other words “Try-pull”. But this was a French word which back in the day most English speakers would have recognized or been influenced by, and would have been pronounced something like “treep-luh” . It’s also spelled the same in Latin and again, the pronunciation of a latin loan word would have been more well known back then (and is pretty close to how we say it now). But I agree with you, tripple would be more clear but we tend not to correct the spellings of foreign loan wards as much. Look at “rendezvous”. Also many spellings got frozen as another commenter said, due to the printing press.
Nipple was earlier ‘nyppell’ and before that ‘neble’. B and P get mixed up so Neble turned into neple. As to why they doubled both the P and the L, IDK but as before the tendency in English is to double up consonants with short vowel sounds like the i in nipple to avoid saying “NYE-pull”
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