2991: Why 'Whole' & 'Who' Have a Double-U Feb 28, 2025

The words ‘whole’, ‘who’, and ‘how’ each have a notable relationship with <W>. ‘Whole’ derives from the Old English hāl, but later, under the influence of its Middle English spelling 'hole' (which led to confusion with ‘hole’), an initial ‘wh-’ was introduced to align it with related words, apparently like 'whale', 'while', & so on. ‘Who’, from the Old English hwā, preserves the ‘wh-’ digraph as a representation of the original pronunciation with [ʍ], due to wh- reduction after an shift from the vowel/ɑː/ to /oː/ in Middle English. 

Similarly, ‘how’ comes from the Old English hū, which, like ‘who’, originally had an audible [ʍ], but over time, the pronunciation evolved while the spelling continued to reflect older phonetic patterns. These inconsistencies illustrate the historical shifts in English orthography, where the ‘wh-’ cluster often preserves archaic pronunciation features or is influenced by analogy rather than phonetic accuracy.