About the Gray (or is it Grey?) Metal (or is it Medal?) - Read (or is it Red?) This!

Last week was very confusing. I used the word medal, which can be a homophone for the grey (Or is it gray?) metal and as confusing (or more) than lead/led/lede. Read and the past participle of read pronounced the same as the color red are not as confusing, but the context is the only way to know how to pronounce the word read.

Let’s begin with the grey area of gray. I admit that I have no idea which spelling is preferable, let alone why there are two spellings. While my dictionary has both spellings, the spelling with an e only redirects to the word gray, which explains that it is a color between white and black. (Aren’t all colors between white and black?)

More of an explanation comes from etymonline.com, which explains that “The distinction between British grey and U.S. gray developed [in the] 20^th century.” So now I know if I am writing for a British audience to use grey and for U.S. audiences I should use gray. But that does not explain why the two spellings developed. I think the etymology it provides helps to explain. Etymonline provides the source of gray or grey as “Old English græg (Mercian grei)…” Because of the digraph æ in the Old English those east of the Atlantic went with the e while those “across the pond” went with the a. But apparently only in the 20^th century.

But what about metal and medal?

Metal, those substances which are a crystalline when solid, comes from the Old French word of the same spelling. The French got their word from the Latin word metallum, which came from the Greek word metallon, and throughout its etymology the words have had the same meaning. That is both unusual and simple for us.

In contrast, the English word medal, has a much more convoluted etymology. A medal is defined as a flat piece of metal bearing an inscription or design and commemorating or honoring a person, action, or event. The word medal came to English in the 1580s from the Middle French word médaille, which came from the Italian word medaglia. It originally was used to describe just a trinket or charm, and was first used in its current meaning in 1751.

Finally, read/read/red. Once again we have the digraph æ to thank for some of the confusion. The origin of the verb pronounced “reed” is Old English: rædan in West Saxon spelling, redan in Anglian spelling. While it only has 46 definitions, most of them have to do with looking at so as to understand the meaning.

I find it interesting that the color red was, in Old English, spelled read. During the Middle English period the vowel sound (along with dead and the metal lead and bread) shortened. But only the color shortened the spelling. And to shorten the word bread would only confuse with the past tense of breed (bred).

As to why we pronounce the past participle of the verb read the same as the color, I could find no explanation. Sometimes English just does not make sense.