The Lieutenant Conundrum

Noah Webster might have radicalised the way that words were spelt in America, but some of his suggestions fell on stoney ground, such as tung for tongue, wimmen for women, and iland for island. He also waded into the debate around which letters should be included in the alphabet. Benjamin Franklin had argued that c, j, q, w, x, and y were unnecessary and that they should be replaced by symbols to reflect the sounds of a as in ball and o in folly, th as in think, th as in thy, sh as in ship, ng as in repeating, and u as in unto.

Webster begged to differ with his former mentor, including each of them in his meisterwerk, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), while reviving the fortunes of j and v, hitherto seen as simply alternative forms of i and u, by giving them sections in their own right. His dictionary was not a commercial success, forcing him to mortgage his home to raise the monies to fund an expanded second edition, which was published in 1840. In 1843, the year of his death, rights to his dictionary were acquired by George and Charles Merriam and his name lives on in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Potato, and tomato, amongst others, might have been the acid test for pronunciation for George Gershwin in Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off (1937), but in my formative teenage years it was lieutenant. Conducting a straw poll on its pronunciation, my English teacher was appalled to find that the majority of the class, sated on a diet of Hollywood blockbusters, plumped for lootenant, prompting a tirade on the insidious attack on all things British by American “culture”.     

Lieutenant, a compound of two French words, lieu meaning “place” and tenant “holding”, describes someone who fulfils the role of someone more senior or who functions as their deputy, the military equivalent of the civilian locum tenens. The earliest examples in English are Scottish, John Barbour’s The Bruce (c1375) using luftenand and the first syllable appearing in other 15th century variants as leeft, luf, leyf, and leyfe. A letter found in the records of the Swiss canton of Fribourg, dated May 29,1447, and signed by Ly Leuftenant douz Chastellant Davenche, seems to accord with the Scots spelling.

There is no definitive explanation why the lieu part of the compound was pronounced leff rather than loo. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) tentatively suggests that the letters “u” and “v” were interchangeable in Middle English with “v” often used at the start of a word and “u” elsewhere. However, it recognises that logically it should mean that lieutenant was pronounced with an “oo”. Alternatively, the “f” and “v” pronunciations, it opines, “may be due to association” with the noun “leave” or the adjective “lief” or, more likely, “that the labial glide at the end of the Old French lieu as the first element of a compound was sometimes apprehended by English-speakers as a v or f”.     

While the spelling of lieutenant settled down in the 17th century, the question of how to pronounce it rumbled on. John Walker in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1793) gave the “actual pronunciation” of the first syllable as “lef” or “liv” but expressing the hope that “the regular sound, lewtenant, will in time become current”. Naturally, Noah Webster waded in, recommending only one pronunciation, lutenant.

Any suggestion that the preferred British pronunciation is due to an innate reluctance to refer to officers using the term “loo” can be put to rest. The slang expression for a toilet did not appear until around the First World War, the first citation in the OED being from Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), and only gained wide usage in the 1930s.

Walker’s hopes that the pronunciation of the word would be standardised across the two countries were dashed and the two distinct forms persist to this day. Vive la difference!