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Why are so many common English words spelled with an initial _w_ but pronounced as if they begin with an _r_ sound? _Write, wrong, wrist, wrath_ – these are among the oldest words in

English. Like _hw-_, _hr-_, and _kn-_, _wr-_ is one of “ye olde” consonant clusters that was pronounced in Anglo-Saxon English but has changed or disappeared in modern English.  Though today

we don’t pronounce the _k_ of knee, it’s pretty easy to do. Some dialects of English still pronounce the _h_ of _hw-_, though now the letters are reversed in words such as _what_ and

_when_. (My first grade teacher insisted that _which_ and _witch_ were not homonyms, to the great confusion of the children in her class, in whose dialect they were homonyms.) But if you

were going to pronounce each letter, how would you say _wr,_ or, even worse, _wl,_ which occurred in Old English words like _wlanc_ (“bold; splendid”) and _wlite_ (“face; beauty”)?  The

Oxford English Dictionary speculates that these clusters were hard to say even for Anglo-Saxons, and cites spellings such as _werritt_ for _writ_ as evidence of “early difficulty in

pronouncing the combination.” The unwieldiness has led some linguists to argue that both letters in these pairs were not pronounced. Philologist Donka Minkova makes a convincing argument

that Anglo-Saxons were indeed pronouncing both letters, stumbling over _write, wreath,_ and so on. She looks at Anglo-Saxon and medieval alliterative verse – poems that are structured by the

repetition of the initial sounds of words, not by rhyme. A 12th-century poem, Layamon’s “Brut,” for example, contains lines such as “he letten writen a writ; & wel hit lette dihten”

(“he had a well-written writ written”). The poem “Cleanness” has an even more alliterative line: “Wlonk whit watz her wede,” something like “Wondrous white was what they wore.”  By the 15th

century, the _w_ sound was disappearing, which led to a spelling free-for-all. If you weren’t pronouncing the _w_, then why use it? So _wrong_ appeared as “rong” and _wring_ as “ringe.”

Conversely, if some _r_ words began with a silent _w_, why not all of them? So “rathe” (an old word for “advice”) could be _wrath_, and “runkel” could be _wrinkle_. These words were

standardized into their current forms in the 18th century, and we now have no trouble remembering which words begin with _w_ – except with _rack_ and _wrack_. As we talked about in another

column, why do we insist on sticking _wrack_ where _rack_ belongs? It seems to me that the archaic tone of _nerve-racking_ must play a part. Though this word was first used in the 20th

century, it sounds old-fashioned, and ye olde _wr-_ consonant cluster seems more appropriate.