Photograph: Alan BetsonWhen you speak of going to a film – let’s say Hamnet, for reasons that will become apparent – do you pronounce the f-word with two syllables or with one? Linguistic detectives rely on three main kinds of evidence to work out what OP Shakespeare sounded like. Shakespeare was highly adept at finding rhymes where they were needed: at the end of sonnet lines, and so on. In the earliest versions of the text, however, the f-word was spelt “philome”, reflecting not just the flexible spellings of the Elizabethan era but the extra syllable Shakespeare would have used. People here continued to say “mate” instead of “meat”, “say” instead of “sea”, “daycent” instead of “decent”, and so on.

Source: The Irish Times February 25, 2026 05:32 UTC