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Reading Dracula, I found this sentence:

It’s a shyme that people are allowed to top their walls with broken bottles

In no dictionary was I able to find a definition; ChatGPT says that it is a misspelling of shame, but the book is old/well-known enough that I think they would have enough time to fix this mistake. So, what is it, precisely?

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  • 13
    It's an attempted phonetic rendition of the dialect pronunciation of shame, intended.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Dec 21, 2023 at 23:34
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    @EdwinAshworth - it's a bladdy shyme, guvnor!
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 24, 2023 at 15:18
  • We Brits call that dialect 'Dick van Dyke'.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 14:24

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Looking at it in context, it appears the author is deliberately misspelling words to capture features of the character Thomas Bilder's accent. The wonderful paper "Nonstandard Language and the Cultural Stakes of Stoker's 'Dracula'" by Ferguson (2004) describes him as a "cockney" (p. 241). As the table on Wikipedia shows, in Cockney the vowel in shame would be pronounced [æɪ~aɪ], much like how speakers of some other dialects would pronounce the vowel in shy, so spelling shame as "shyme" would be a sensible way of capturing that feature of the dialect in question.

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  • Related to this answer, you'll find this from a number of other authors too. Charles Dickens often used this to give the phonetic "feel" of someone's accent. His phonetic spelling was good enough that it's been used to track changes in accent over time. George Orwell commented in Down and out in Paris and London (written in the 1930s) that some aspects of the Cockney dialect such as pronouncing "v" as "w" had been lost in the years since Dickens.
    – Graham
    Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 12:59
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    It's not only done with Cockney accents; many accents/dialects where the pronunciation has a significant divergence from "standard" English (either UK Standard Received or US "Midwest Newscaster") will be represented by false-phonetic spelling where representing the accent/dialect is considered important for showing the character of the... er, character.
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Commented Dec 22, 2023 at 15:41
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    Might be worth mentioning that the word for this is “eye dialect.”
    – Daniel B
    Commented Dec 24, 2023 at 4:06
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This is the word "shame". It's spelled as "shyme" to represent how it sounds in the local accent. It's apparently Cockney, or something similar; if you're unfamiliar with this accent, watch the movie "My Fair Lady" and notice the accent of Eliza and her friends/family. A hallmark of this accent is that in many words, a long "a" is pronounced like "aye".

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  • My mother was as Cockney as they come, and so were all of her brothers and sisters (except one who went to live in Orpington) and they didn't say 'shame' like that.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 26, 2023 at 14:25
  • It's the stereotype. But maybe it's an exaggeration for Americans -- how does Audrey Hepburn's accent in My Fair Lady compare to your family's?
    – Barmar
    Commented Dec 27, 2023 at 21:25
  • Hepburn's 'Cockney' accent sounds nothing like my mother's family's accent. It sounds like what it is - an actorly exaggeration for Americans. In fact it's not even exaggeration of her own accent - it's self-taught imitation. She was born in Belgium to aristocratic English parents, was privately educated there and in Kent, and spent a lot of her youth in the Netherlands.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 28, 2023 at 9:35
  • I have seen praise by critics of Hepburn's 'accent'; it wouldn't fool any British person.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 28, 2023 at 9:36
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    Brits seem to do better at imitating American accents (or maybe dialect coaching has gotten better since the 60's). There are lots of them on American TV (e.g. both Andrew Lincoln and Lauren Cohan on The Walking Dead) and it's impossible to tell.
    – Barmar
    Commented Dec 28, 2023 at 16:34

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