Ghis a strange path for an English word to start . There are only a fistful of normally used words that get down with this spelling . Beyond the spirit bunch ofghost , ghastly , andghoul , we have borrow words likeghetto , gherkin , andghee , some topographic point names likeGhanaandGhent — and that ’s about it . Which may have made you wonder : What ’s up with thegh ? Turns out , it has a little something to do with a fifteenth - one C publisher .
Ghoulwas borrowed into English in the 1700s from the Arabicghul(meaning“shape - shifting desert demon , monster , ” per the Oxford English Dictionary ) , but ab initio , it was used without theh , asgoulorgoule . It was later lured over to theghgroup by its semantic similarity toghost .
But how didghostget itsgh ? compare to the otherghwords , ghostis both a batch more frequent and a lot older , going all the elbow room back to Old Englishgást . Until the 1500s , over a few centuries of linguistic process variety , it was spelledgast , gæst , gost , goste , goost , andgoist . Ghastly — from the related , Middle Englishgastliche — also came inh - loose spellings until the 1500s .
We can hound the introduction of thehinghostandghastlyback toWilliam Caxton , the man who bring in the publish imperativeness to England in the 1470s . He had established his first press in Bruges , and he brought some Flemish typesetter back with him when he returned to set up concern in Westminster . In his chronicle of spelling , Spell It Out , linguist David Crystalwritesthat “ in City of Bridges they would all have been used to read manuscripts in Flemish spelling . So if a discussion reminded them of its Flemish counterpart , why not write it that way ? The boss would n’t take care , as long as the word of honor were perceivable . He had more to vex about than spelling . ”
The typesetters also usedghin their spellings ofgoose , goat , andgirl , but those spellings never caught on . For some reasonableness , onlyghostandghastlykept theh . Maybe because the words front spookier that way . Indeed , a story about the ghost of a “ ghoos ghoot gherle ” sounds downright terrifying . Thank ghoodness those spelling have ghone .
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A version of this story run in 2013 ; it has been update for 2024 .
