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From: "tracey gardiner" <>
Subject: gaol or jail,
Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 15:12:13 -0000


here is something useful I found!
Why `Jail' is spelt `gaol'

For those who haven't yet noticed, the English are...not so much patriotic as loyal. Patriotism is overt, loud, and aggressive, and the English don't do that sort of thing. But when it comes to their country, they are loyal.

So when war shortages came along, the English tightened their belts and cut back on everything: fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, fresh meat, fabrics, rubber, metal... anything at all that could be useful to the war effort. Everything was rationed. Oil, gasoline, electricity, and sugar forced many changes in the way things were done. And of course there was the fear of spying; interception of any kind of communications at all caused letter writing to become circumspect and brief.

There's another reason communications changed, of course. Everyone has a grandparent, parent, or aunt or uncle who has told stories of the deprivations brought on by wars. It's easy to make jokes about it now. How air was rationed, trees were rationed, Auntie Sarah still has her ration book for ration books, and so forth. And so when the ink shortage gets mentioned, so do the oxygen, tree, and ration book shortages.

Of course 'gaol' is the original spelling of the word, in the traditional 'we must not spell it the way it is pronounced for that would make it too easy for foreigners' way of the English. The word 'gayhole', 'gayol', or 'gaile' (spelling of course was not yet standardised at the time) was adopted into Middle English from the Old Northern French word 'gaiole' or 'gaole', and also the Old French 'geole' which came from the Romanic and popular Latin 'gaviola', which is commonly hypothesised to be from the word 'caveola', meaning 'cage' in the same language.

But there was an ink shortage on, and many of the traditionally whimsical English spellings were hard hit. Names lost silent Es at the end ('Anne' became 'Ann'), letters were removed ('Featherstonehaugh' gave way to 'Fanshawe' which was allowed to keep an E at the end after having dropped 9 letters), and letters were replaced. The modern spelling of Catherine with a C instead of a K is an example; the K requires an extra stroke of the pen.

'Gaol' likewise was replaced by 'jail,' which took out the C-shape at the front of the first letter, and a lower-case I is half as big as an O, in terms of space and ink. This also helped conserve paper.



so there you go, you learn something new everyday!

Tracey Lincoln UK

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