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What I understand so far:

Wrecking - to trash/destroy/be destroyed

Wracking - to be tortured, possibly from variant of "rack". http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=wrack also seems to mention that using the word "wrack" in the sense of torture is a mistaken usage.

Wreaking - "wreaking havoc" is the only example I can think of that uses this word, and it was apparently used in a similar manner to "wrath" archaically. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wreak

What I want to find out:

The 3 etymologies seem to all be linked to "wrecan" via divergent evolution, but how closely linked together are the etymologies of these 3 words, and how did the final one, "wreak", end up sounding like "reek"?

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  • possible duplicate of Why did only English undergo the Great Vowel Shift, making pronunciation stray so far from spelling?
    – tchrist ♦
    Dec 11, 2014 at 22:15
  • 2
    @tchrist; How is a question on separate but linked etymologies 'pronunciation-vs-spelling'? And your first comment is needlessly dismissive, bordering on offensive.
    – Tim Lymington
    Dec 11, 2014 at 23:07
  • @TimLymington It says: “[stuff stuff stuff] and how did the final one, "wreak", end up sounding like "reek"?” If that isn’t a pronunciation-vs-spelling question, I don’t know what is. It’s assuming that some way of spelling a word seems like it should be pronounced some other way, as though that’s how things worked in English. What he should be assuming is that ea is pronounced the way it is in all of creature, creation, steak, dear, bear, hearse, hearken, heaven, beau, meander, cetacea, paean. Maybe it has two questions—that’s the second.
    – tchrist ♦
    Dec 12, 2014 at 0:43

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Etymonline says that wreck came from Scandinavian, wrack from Dutch, and wreak from Old English, although these were all descendants of the proto-Germanic verb wrekan. Probably the sound changes going from proto-Germanic to Scandinavian, Dutch, and English are all reasonably predicatable, although I don't know enough about this to tell. I don't believe the change from Old English wrecan to Modern English wreak is at all unusual.

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Note that wreak and wreck do not have the same meaning. Oxford Dictionary has an interesting blog about this, where they explain the difference in meaning, and says something about the entymology, that I will quote here, because it's relevant for your question:

"The confusion of wreck and wreak is fairly common. In the Oxford English Corpus, which gathers real-world examples of usage, around 5% of all written examples of the phrase are written as ‘wreck havoc’ as opposed to ‘wreak havoc’.

The overlap between the words has a long history: the Oxford English Dictionary records use of wreck as a variant spelling and pronunciation of wreak in the 16th through 18th centuries, including examples by such well-regarded authors as Milton and Oliver Goldsmith. However, this usage was regarded as obsolete by the early 20th century, and is now considered a mistake." source

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