Amol Rajan is right to change his ways on ‘aitch’

My husband thought it brave and manly of the BBC’s Amol Rajan to resolve publicly to change his pronunciation of the letter-name aitch. He’d said haitch all his life, but declared in a blog: ‘Dear reader, I’m here to tell you: it’s aitch.’ This attracted wide attention. He also announced that biopic is pronounced bio-pic, not bi-opic. That is true too, but attracted little attention.

Amol Rajan is 40 and took an English degree at Cambridge, but has only just caught up with the eighth letter in the alphabet. Still, we all have blind spots. The key to the mispronunciation haitch is hypercorrection. Children were so often told to pronounce their initial aitches that when it came to the letter’s name, they felt there must be one there too.

Mr Rajan says: ‘Haitch is actually listed as a variant in the Oxford English Dictionary.’ He provides a link to Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase & Fable, which is not the same thing. There it says the pronunciation ‘haitch rather than aitch is a distinctive feature of Hiberno-English’.

Aitch is a funny name for a letter, when the others are so dull. Michael Rosen has said that we owe its name ‘to the Normans, who brought their letter hache with them in 1066. Hache is the source of our word hatchet: probably because a lower-case H looks a lot like an axe.’

I don’t think that is true. The Normans might have used the Old French word ache for H, though not because it named a hatchet but, like Spanish ache, it derived from the late Latin for H, accha or ahha.

The classical Latin had been ha. Before the Norman Conquest, Aelfric had written an English grammar. He said ‘h and k geendiað on a’ – h and k end in a. In other words H was ha.

After the Conquest, until Shakespeare’s time, the English name was ache, pronounced not like belly-ache but like ash. This turned into aitch as early as 1623.

It surprises me haitch is increasing. Jeremy Butterfield, editor of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, thinks haitch will prevail, ‘unspeakably uncouth though it may appear’.