What's with the 'heigth' pandemic?

Question

Recently I've noticed that many people are pronouncing the word 'height' as

/haiθ/

That's right, heigth.

I've only ever heard this pronunciation mistake in the last few years. Maybe it's just an issue in Texas? Has anyone else noticed this?

Answer 1

Heighth is no error

It is a misunderstanding that the spelling or pronunciation of heighth is an illiterate and uneducated error. Although many wrongly consider it such, history is not on their side, nor are the better dictionaries.

Despite how in particular over the last century the heighth spelling has come to be stigmatized, heighth is a perfectly legitimate word of ancient lineage. It was used not only by Shakespeare and Milton, but even by Charles Dickens, who wrote considerably later than the first two.

The spelling that is no longer used is hight, although it was once common. Interestingly, Shakespeare variously employed not only height and heighth but also hight, depending on the work:

• 1591 Shaks. Two Gentlemen from Verona, ɪᴠ. iv. 169 — I know she is about my height.
• 1594 Shaks. Richard III, ɪ. iii. 41 — I feare our happinesse is at the height.
• circa 1600 Shaks. Sonnet xxxii — Exceeded by the hight of happier men.
• 1606 Shaks. Anthony & Cleopatra ɪɪɪ. x. 21 — Anthony..Leauing the Fight in heighth, flyes after her.
• 1606 Shaks. Troilus & Cressida, ᴠ. i. 3 — Let vs Feast him to the hight.
• 1613 Shaks. Henry VIII, ɪ. ii. 214 — By day and night Hee’s Traytor to th’ height.

Editions of Anthony & Cleopatra with normalized spellings now generally read:

The noble ruin of her magic, Antony,
Claps on his sea-wing and, like a doting mallard
Leaving the fight in height, flies after her.
I never saw an action of such shame.
Experience, manhood, honor, ne’er before
Did violate so itself.

The thing to understand, though, is that this is not some spelling that died out when the reign of Elizabeth I came to an end. It remained in use by writers of unimpeachable integrity up through the 19^th century and sometimes even into the early 20^th.

All three forms of the word — height, heighth, hight — were long used, but in truth, only the last of those has completely fallen away. For while the OED no longer admits hight as a modern spelling, it does present both height and heighth as admissible variants, with -th listed second. In its rather long etymology section on this word, it observes (bold emphasis mine):

In ME. the forms in -t were predominant in the north, and since 1500 have increasingly prevailed in the literary language; though heighth, highth were abundant in southern writers till the 18th c., and are still affected by some.

So if you don’t mind being falsely accused of being wrong, or perhaps with somewhat stronger evidence of writing in an affected manner, go ahead and use it. After all, Microsoft doesn’t know everything about English, so you should never trust its software in matters of writing. :)

Here sorted by date are the OED citations for the heighth spelling, excepting only those already given:

• 1548 Hall Chron., Hen. VIII, 77 — The same Trees were..in heighth from the foote to the toppe .xxxiiii. foote of assise.

• 1590 Sir J. Smyth Disc. Weapons 18 b, — Bullets for the field being smaller and lower..than the heighths of the peeces by a bore.

• 1611 B. Jonson Catiline iii. iv, — The heighth of wickednesse.

• 1672 Bp. Patrick Dev. Chr. (1676) 258 — O the heighth, the depth, the breadth of thy love in Christ Jesus.

• 1697 Dampier Voy. I. 370 — Now was the heighth of the Easterly Monsoon.

• 1704 in B. Church Hist. Philip’s War (1867) II. 164 — Carrying the Remainder into Captivity in the heighth of Winter.

• 1714 Swift Pres. St. Affairs Wks. 1755 II. i. 210 — Those who professed the heighth of what is called the church principle.

• 1756 Burke Subl. & B. ii. x, — The Medium betwixt an excessive length or heighth and a short or broken quantity.

• 1762 Gentl. Mag. 142 — To such a heighth is licentiousness risen.

• 1765 T. Hutchinson Hist. Mass. I. 57 — Carrying antinomianism to the heighth.

• 1809 Roland Fencing 22 — It depends on the person’s heighth.

• 1918 H. Bindloss Agatha’s Fortune xxv, — It was hardly a range of hills, but rather what prospectors call a ‘heighth’ of land.

What the Dickens!

But that’s not all! Consider the Charles Dickens story “Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions”, published in 1865:

The doctor having accepted a tea-tray, you’ll guess that my father was a Cheap Jack before me. You are right. He was. It was a pretty tray. It represented a large lady going along a serpentining up-hill gravel-walk, to attend a little church. Two swans had likewise come astray with the same intentions. When I call her a large lady, I don’t mean in point of breadth, for there she fell below my views, but she more than made it up in heighth; her heighth and slimness was—in short THE heighth of both.

As you see, that sounds perfectly fine. Please note that modern editions of that work are not respelled as so often now occurs with Shakespeare. Heighth is retained just as Dickens wrote it.

Notice also how in the Dickens citation, heighth has a distinct advantage when used in conjunction with breadth or length, since now one retains a certain parallelism of form that would be lost were it spelled height.

Recommendation

That said, I personally would not in general recommend writing heighth unless you are writing a period piece. I say this not out of correctness, but to fend off the hypercorrective efforts of those with less education, given how few today realize its actual provenance and legitimacy.

If you do choose to use heighth, however, you should probably be prepared to back up your use at the very least with the OED, which attaches no stigma to that spelling, and probably with citations from other writers of note.

Answer 2

Well, it seems that the misconception regarding the spelling/pronunciation is due to some confusion regarding dimension-related words:

• Depth
• Width
• Breadth

And....

• Height

I have some links that would suggest that this is the reason for the misuse.

Answer 3

On his World Wide Words website, etymologist Michael Quinion describes the phenomenon and its origins here:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-hei1.htm

He sums up its current status thus:

Because of its odd history, we can hardly argue that highth is truly an error, more an archaism. Though nearly everyone now spells it height, it’s not that uncommon to hear it said as /haɪtθ/ [1] among educated people in North America, and some authorities there consider it to be a permissible variant.

[1] Pronunciation help is provided here:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm

Answer 4

A couple of points: why do you assume it to be a mispronunciation? It used to be common in my youth in New Zealand, where we speak British English. It started to fall out of use around the end of World War Two, when American English became popular, due mainly to Hollywood influences. It goes back at least as far as 1588.

Answer 5

Agree that its not a modern phenomenon - I remember heighth from Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. In the first chapter, Alex says:

There were three devotchkas sitting at the counter all together, but there were four of us malchicks and it was usually like one for all and all for one. These sharps were dressed in the heighth of fashion too, with purple and green and orange wigs on their gullivers, each one not costing less than three or four weeks of those sharps' wages, I should reckon, and make-up to match ...

Burgess 'created' Nadsat for the novel, using Russian and Polari (c.f. this article from The Guardian), I wonder if his usage stems from either of those.

Answer 6

I feel it is a "dialectical variant" and there are sufficient proofs that it is simply a popular mispronunciation the educated population have grown too tired of correcting. Just because a mispronunciation has become commonly used doesn't make it a legitimate word.

"Heighth" is a chiefly dialectal variant of "height".