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Look at the endings of the following words:

blight, bought, breadth, brought, caught, delight, depth, fifth, fought, fourth, fright, freight, height, light, plight, taught, thought, width, ...

As you may have already noticed, some of the words in that list end in ht, whereas the rest of them end in th. I have some questions regarding those endings:

I. Do all words of the English language that end with ht end, actually, with ght?

II. Is there any rule of thumb out there that helps one to recall (or determine) when the ending of a given word is th and not ht (or the other way around)?

Thanks in advance for your insightful replies!

Laurel
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José Hdz. Stgo.
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  • Well 'yacht' is an exception. However most do and all such words end either in 'ght' or 'cht' apart from words that are directly borrowed from other languages. – chasly - supports Monica Oct 29 '15 at 22:56
  • I. the only exceptions listed by Wordfind.com are borscht/borsht, klepht, waucht, whisht, pht, phpht, yacht, licht, wecht, baht, echt. Of these, only yacht seems at all common to me. II. After any letters besides gh, we use "th". They're pronounced differently. – herisson Oct 29 '15 at 23:01
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    As for a rule, well you have formulated it yourself. The exceptions don't end in 'ght' or 'cht'. – chasly - supports Monica Oct 29 '15 at 23:01
  • @sumelic, Ah yes, whisht. More Scottish or Irish than English. – chasly - supports Monica Oct 29 '15 at 23:03
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    I'm not sure how exactly you're running into trouble remembering which words end with "th" and which end with "ht." Do these endings have identical pronunciation in your dialect? Or do you only write the language, and never speak or hear it? The usefulness of our answers may depend on this detail. – user867 Oct 29 '15 at 23:07
  • @user867: So, the rule of dumb that you are putting forward goes basically thus: "LISTEN CAREFULLY AND PRONOUNCE PROPERLY"? I wonder in what universe such a general suggestion would count as a rule of thumb for the very specific need which prompted my second question... – José Hdz. Stgo. Oct 30 '15 at 02:28
  • @J.H.S. I wasn't putting forth a rule of thumb. I was seriously asking. If the OP was, for example, deaf, they'd need a rule that didn't depend on being able to sound things out. On the other hand, if they're learning English as a second language, we might be able to come up with something that makes sense in terms of their own native language. Knowing why they have difficulty makes it easier to write an answer that they'll find useful. – user867 Oct 30 '15 at 02:34

2 Answers2

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All the words in your list which end with -th have it as a suffix, meaning either an ordinal:

four -> fourth

five -> fifth

or an abstract quantity which is a measure

broad -> breadth

deep -> depth

wide -> width

The remaining words, ending in -t, either have the past-tense suffix -t (which is a variant of -ed, but is never -th):

buy -> bought

teach -> taught

or have no discernable suffix at all, as in delight and fright.

The sole exceptions are height and weight, which are in the same class as width etc, and one might expect to be heigth or weighth, but they aren't. These two need to be learnt as exceptions.

Community
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Colin Fine
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In my speculum.txt file (rev wordlist.txt | sort | rev > speculum.txt),
g/.*ght$/ finds 8 words reverse-alphabetized after .*ght$:

klepht Yasht wheesht tweesht accomplisht wisht borsht fusht.

And 35 words reverse-alphabetized before .*ght$:

Aht baht Mooachaht Ehatisaht Ahousaht Poblacht Eoghanacht Pacht mynpacht Gaeltacht yacht aeroyacht superyacht Diancecht landsknecht pecht Albrecht Utrecht wecht slicht micht richt unricht wricht wicht ocht thocht wrocht socht borscht straucht waucht feucht throucht mowcht.

John Lawler
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