I think it’s another facet of the phenomenon where people think they don’t have an accent; everybody else does. The assumption that everyone else is doing something ‘different’ from ‘normal’.
Are you going to argue with John Milton and the OED?
But we have an explosion of new words anyway, so why not something as trivial as “heighth”?
Height is pronounced as Hite (like kite) in Australia, I’ve never heard a th added to the end. That would be like adding a th at the end of Weight (which is pronounced the same as Wait)
Because not that many people say it, and a significant percentage of them don’t say it intentionally. They wouldn’t say it if not in conjunction with words like ‘width’ and ‘depth’. Asked to spell it they realize there is no such word. The standard for adopting a new word is when ‘everybody’ says it. And ‘everybody’ doesn’t mean every single person any more than ‘nobody’ means no single person, but right now the number of people who believe ‘heighth’ is a word is closer to ‘nobody’ than ‘everybody’.
I suspect the percentage of English-language speakers who pronounce the word with a th sound at the end is well under half but still a significant number. I don’t know of any way to check this though. Please don’t say that something is not a word if it’s not used in your dialect. Anything that used by a group of people to speak to each other is a word. Your personal dialect doesn’t define the limits of the English language.
I agree with this statement.
When I was reading this discussion, it dawned on me that people I know will say ‘heighth’ will say it when also saying ‘length’ and/or ‘width’, as in describing the dimensions of something. But when describing a person, they will say ‘height’, when also saying ‘weight’.
But again, the question is whether it is “a word” of its own or merely an alternative pronunciation of the word “height.”
“Word” is an inherently ambiguous concept – starting with what it means when comparing languages with lots of inflections/case endings (like Spanish or Russain), vs. languages without them (e.g., English and, especially, Mandarin), vs. agglutinative languages (like Ojibwe or, apparently, Klingon).
Not to mention the added complication when a language happens to also be written down, which often imposes yet other notions of “what is a word.”
Well, actually… that word “weight” is the clipping of “weigh+th” in the same way that “height” is the clipping of “high+th”.
The “th” pronunciation is the lingering use of the original pronunciation. The “-th” suffix has been in English and its antecedents since Proto-Indo-European. The change of the suffix to “t” in the words “height” and “weight” is the variation from the typical use suffix.
The statement:
is missing the forest for the trees. It’s not that remarkable that some people still use the original form that follows the original pattern, even if prestige dialects proscribe it.
It’s not about dialects. ‘Heighth’ is not a word found in dictionaries of modern English. People can say it all they like, it’s about an accepted spelling of the word ‘height’. People may say it but I doubt they write it very often, or when asked to use it in a sentence they’ll realize the problem.
Anything you say aloud that is recognized as a word may be considered a word, but in writing there are accepted spellings and ‘heighth’ is not an accepted spelling for ‘height’, nor is ‘heighth’ the spelling of any written word.
You need a better dictionary. I already linked to the Old English antecedent (which links to the modern versions). Here’s the Modern English:
Even online Merriam-Webster has it:
As a dialectal variant of ‘height’, as used in the rest of the definition. I’m not trying to proscribe it’s use, I couldn’t care less if people want to say it, but it is on the outskirts of well defined words, and I’m sure that most people don’t intentionally mean to say it. Where formality is required, and I’m glad that’s not something I have to deal with anymore, the word is ‘height’. Feel free to say or write ‘heighth’ to your hearth’s content.
Most times I’d be arguing your side of a word issue like this. So I’ll be more specific about the context. When I was developing software in the late 70s to be sold by a Fortune 500 company they had useless people who’s job was to check every word that appeared on the screen or in documentation according to whatever stupid standard they arbitrarily used. Under those constraints ‘heighth’ is not a word.
Is who’s a word?
“Who’s there?”
But yeah, spelling mistake in the original.
@TriPolar has the right idea. “Is ‘heighth’ a word?” is not useful question, “what spelling should we use in this context?” is a useful question. Unfortunately, many people conflate a word with a spelling, which makes discussions about words difficult.
Yes. But I misused it.
I dated a woman who had a number of idiosyncratic criteria that a guy would have to pass for her to consider him a possible partner. Some made sense, like she wouldn’t accept a guy who didn’t have children, arguing that being a parent forces you to make sacrifices for others in a way that non parents can’t understand. But one of her shibboleths was a guy would lose points if he pronounced “height” with a th at the end.