A few days ago
Anonymous

What is the logic in the spelling of Colonel?

Yeah, I know very random question but with English being a difficult language, why is Colonel spelled that way? I know of silent letters but why an “L” AND THE “O’ The way it’s spelled it doesn’t seem like it would be pronouced the way it is. What is the logic with this and the rules of spelling?

Top 3 Answers
A few days ago
Anonymous

Favorite Answer

Logic really doesn’t have anything to do with the pronunciation of this word which entered English from French which took from Italian derived from Latin. (see the source)

While a lot of people complain about the rules of pronouncing English words, the truth is that English has borrowed countless words from other languages. Our language is richer because of it.

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6 years ago
Anonymous
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RE:
What is the logic in the spelling of Colonel?
Yeah, I know very random question but with English being a difficult language, why is Colonel spelled that way? I know of silent letters but why an "L" AND THE "O' The way it's spelled it doesn't seem like it would be pronouced the way it is. What is the logic with this…

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A few days ago
Diane H
This is actually kind of interesting. The word came into English from Middle French (well, originally from Latin, if you trace it back far enough). But, there were two variants of the same word – colonel and coronel. Colonel was the more conservative version, and became the standard in English for the written word. Coronel was the variant that got adopted into spoken English, and subsequently got shortened to be pronounced “kernel”.
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