As anyone into crosswords or Scrabble knows, there aren’t a whole lot of words in the English language ending with the letter “v”. Why is that?
I don’t know the answer, but I can at least refine the question a bit. I can think of plenty of examples of words that end in a V sound: Move, have, live, love, dove, rove. But it seems like all of them are spelled with an e after the v, even when that would seem to contravene usual English rules for a final E (for instance, “live” (the verb) is pronounced “liv”, even though it looks like it should always be “live” (the adjective)).
Well, luv, don’t reckon I got time for that.
Busy doing improv in the lav with a perv using a shiv, guv.
Most of which are shortened or affected forms of words spelled without the final V. “Shiv” is the only one that’s not, and it appears to come from Romany, a rather atypical source for English vocabulary.
A few Yiddish (?) words suitable for scrabble: lev, tav…
A few abbreviations: rev, the ones abov
Lots of Russian surnames: Romanov
Not lots of English words ending in b, j, q or u.
Ebb, flub, comb, lamb, plumb, nob, nib, crib, tab, jib… just off the top of my head in about 10 seconds.
Not many words come to us from Russia or other countries where words more commonly end in a ‘v’. Most of our language is a mishmash derived from Romance and Germanic languages. Some words from eastern Europe that end in ‘w’, like Krakow, are pronounced with more of a ‘v’ sound than a ‘w’; they say crack-oov, we say crack-ow. In Germany, a ‘v’ is pronounced like ‘f’ and a ‘w’ is pronounced like a ‘v’. So Volkswagen is ‘folksvagen’. My $.02, anyway.
I’d say there are a lot more for b than the others.
rub a dub dub time to scrub the tub
Lack of common words ending in q likely has a lot to do with q normally requiring a u immediately following other than in some very foreign based words where it’s basically used in place of where, were it an english word, k or ck would go.
For that matter, I can’t think of many common words ending in c either. It’s usually ck or k or s, depending on which c sound is used. or even ce for words like ice.
Blame it on the French. They’re always a good whipping boy for English spelling irrationalities.
BTW, one of the most common English words: of, is one of the few (if not only) words that have an F that’s not pronounced /f/.
How about all the words that end with -ic: public, music, basic, …
I wrote a quick program to analyze the distribution of final letters in 471,042 words from /usr/share/dict/words on my Linux system. V is the third least common final letter, behind J and Q.
e 44194 18.74%
y 27746 11.76%
s 26059 11.05%
n 19961 8.46%
d 15988 6.78%
r 15462 6.56%
l 14926 6.33%
t 14822 6.28%
a 12594 5.34%
c 11323 4.80%
m 8861 3.76%
g 6431 2.73%
h 4753 2.02%
k 2645 1.12%
o 2299 0.97%
p 2198 0.93%
i 1983 0.84%
f 918 0.39%
x 793 0.34%
w 702 0.30%
u 523 0.22%
b 476 0.20%
z 143 0.06%
v 37 0.02%
j 17 0.01%
q 6 0.00%
Thanks for the list, confirms b is relatively rare for a last letter. But really, in any language some letters are going to be rare. And some letters mainly used on “foreign” words, like q without u (qat, qoph, qintar)…
Russian is one of a number of languages where voiced consonants lose their voicing at the end of a word. Hence, “Romanov” is pronounced “Romanoff” in its base (nominative) form. English may have acquired the habit of adding the “e” to the end of words that end in “v” as a sort of vestige of its ancestry and kept it out of habit.
Great post, markn+. Thank you for that.
I once wrote an article for Word Ways listing all the words I could find ending with J. IIRC, there were about 40 or so. Note that I found them in a variety of dictionaries and virtually all of them were really obscure.
I would have done Q, but someone had already beaten me to that by listing all the words that have Q not followed by U. He also found words with QU not followed by a vowel.
Word Ways articles are online in pdf format. I could find links to these if anyone really wants them.
In Old English, the sounds of F and V were allophones. (“Of” ends in /v/, you’ll note.) So if an F was between two vowels, it sounded like V. Leaf > Leaves.
In other words, originally, words couldn’t end in the V sound. They’d be pronounced -F. For example, the Old English word for “hive” is “hyf.”
Time passes, and sound changes happen. We lost some endings. It started to be possible to have a word-final V, but since it was a newer thing, and also since the Roman alphabet didn’t distinguish U & V yet, we spelled final V as VE most of the time.
So basically, it’s because V is really historically just a special kind of F in English, and we have loads of words that end in F. S / Z is the same deal.
Thanks, guys, for all the info. Some very interesting stuff here. And a special thanks to markn+.
[nitpick]
Actually, they (assuming you mean Poles) say it with an “f” sound at the end. A “w” in Polish is normally what we call a “v” sound in English, but at the end of a word (and in some other cases), it’s unvoiced, so an “f.” So, more like “CRAH-koof.”
[/nitpick]
Nit pick: In Old English, the plural of “léaf” is “léaf” [nom], “léaf”[acc], “léafa” [gen], “léafum” [dat]
Yes, but the implication of the wording here is that letters somehow have agency and intrinsically make sounds, but they don’t. Rather, we use them to represent sounds, with varying degrees of consistency in English. So I would say the way to describe this situation is that it’s one of the few (if only) instances where /v/ is written with an “f,” (and that’s because of the phonological changes Dr. Drake describes above).