2735: Crocodile Spelling Reform Jun 16, 2024

Spelling and pronunciation are often brought into English from Latin, though of course this historical, multilingual game of telephone brought along with it many bugs. 'Crocodile' was for a long time rendered as 'cocodrile', an error made in later forms of Latin that transferred into French and adopted into English. It was brought back to 'crocodile' based off of the Greek κροκόδειλος (krokó-deilos), itself meaning 'rock + worm'. In Ancient Indo-European languages there is a clear relation between rocks and sitting reptiles, perhaps because of their tendency to sit on rocks. This etymology would not be immediately evident to the average Middle English speaker, nor modern for that matter, but in the later years of the renaissance there was a concerted effort to bring English spelling in line with that of Latin and Greek, and at least in this case it managed to affect the pronunciation, compared with other words like ‘salmon’ where the L was added but the pronunciation never differed.