Why Do We Pronounce the ‘-ed’ in ‘Wicked’?
Wicked!
Neal Whitman, Writing for
Listen to yourself read this passage aloud:
I stood naked on the rugged, jagged precipice, and faced my accursed, aged foe with dogged resolve. The wretched, wicked wizard stretched a crooked finger from a ragged sleeve. As he began to mutter the incantation, I thought of my beloved Hildegarde.
How’s that to set you on the edge of your seat? Aside from the gripping drama and suspense, what did you notice? Maybe you noticed that it had way too many adjectives. True enough, but there’s more. Every one of those adjectives—naked, rugged, jagged, accursed, aged, dogged, wretched, wicked, crooked, ragged, and beloved—has the same unusual pronunciation of the suffix –ed. If these words were pronounced like most English words ending in –ed, they’d be pronounced /nekt/, /rʌɡd/, /ʤæɡd/, /əkɝst/, /eʤd/, /dɑɡd/, /wɪkt/, /rɛʧt/, /krʊkt/, /ræɡd/, and /bɪlʌvd/. That’s because usually, the –ed suffix is just pronounced as a d or t at the end of the last syllable of the word it gets suffixed to. It’s pronounced as a d when the base word ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant; for example, agreed, grabbed, hummed, raved, writhed, sailed, roared, leaned, buzzed, bridged, hugged, and longed. It’s pronounced as a t when the base word ends in a voiceless consonant; for example, flapped, puffed, toothed, hissed, scratched, and looked.
Sometimes the –ed suffix is pronounced as its own syllable. This happens when the base word already ends in a d or t sound; for example, floated and braided. But none of the adjectives we’re talking about have a d or t sound before the –ed suffix, so it’s strange that their –ed suffix should be pronounced as a separate syllable.
Instead, they have a mixture of consonants before the -ed. Most of them have a k sound there (e.g., naked, wicked, and crooked), or they have a hard g sound before the -ed (e.g., ragged, rugged, jagged, and dogged). A couple of them have a ch or soft g sound before the –ed: wretched and aged. One more has an s there: accursed. Lastly, there’s beloved, whose base ends with a v sound.
Furthermore, I didn’t even include all the adjectives with this pronunciation quirk in my sentences. I left out learned and blessed, and still others whose pronunciations vary depending on dialect: /fɔrkəd/vs. /fɔrkt/ [forked], /pikəd/ vs. /pikt/ [peaked], /əlɛʤəd/ vs. /əlɛʤd/ [alleged], /səpozəd/ vs. /səpozd/ [supposed], /lɛgəd/ vs. /lɛgd/ [legged], and /strɑɪpəd/ vs. /strɑɪpt/ [striped]. And those are just the ones that I knew about.
I was surprised to learn that as late as 1839, the words booked, tusked, tressed, scabbed, crabbed, chubbed, stubbed, shagged, snagged, scrubbed, scragged, hawked, and stiff-necked were also pronounced with a separate syllable for –ed, at least according to a book published that year called A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language, by one John Walker.
In short, there’s nothing that these consonants have in common that separates them from other consonants.
So is there some kind of rule for when we pronounce the –ed suffix as its own syllable? There are a few observations that can be made, but it’s not going to be definitive.
Context
Sometimes the adjective is pronounced differently depending on the context. For example, if you’re talking about old people, the pronunciation /eʤd/ is more likely, but if you’re talking about old cheese or wine, you probably want /eʤəd/. If you’re talking about higher education, you can have /lɝnəd/ scholars and /lɝnəd/ societies, but if you’re talking about psychology, you might be talking about /lɝnd/ behaviors.
Part of Speech
The word dogged comes from the noun dog and the –ed suffix and means having the characteristics of a dog.
One thing we can say about these adjectives is that some of them are derived from past participles of verbs, and these past participles are pronounced as we would expect. For example, you might talk about a /blɛsəd/ event, but you wouldn’t say the priest has /blɛsəd/ a house; you’d say he has /blɛst/ it. You might have a /lɝnəd/ person for an advisor, but you wouldn’t say, “I have /lɝnəd/ my ABCs”; you’d say you’d /lɝnd/ them.
Others of these adjectives are derived by putting the suffix –ed on a noun instead of a verb. For example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word dogged comes from the noun dog and the –ed suffix and means having the characteristics of a dog. In this case, the –ed suffix isn’t turning a verb into a past participle; it’s turning a noun directly into an adjective. (That’s English for you: It takes one perfectly good suffix and overloads it with different jobs. Just look how it treats the suffix –s: It shows present-tense singular in goes, plurality in cars, and possession in Shawn’s.)
Origins
Of course, one well-known trait of English nouns and verbs is that nouns often turn into verbs, and verbs often turn into nouns, without any difference in form or pronunciation. That makes things more complicated. Take the adjective crooked. The archaic verb crook meant to put a bend in something. Turned into a noun, crook referred to such a bend. So it’s not clear whether the adjective crooked came from the verb crook, and referred to something bent, or from the noun crook, and meant something that had a bend? Is there even a difference? Most of these adjectives fall into this gray area, where we don’t know whether the noun or the verb came first, or even if we do, we don’t know which one gave rise to the adjective ending in –ed.
This is true not only for adjectives ending in –ed that have the strange pronunciation, but also for those that are pronounced exactly as we’d expect. For example, there’s the verb outfit, and the noun outfit. Does the adjective outfitted come from the verb outfit or the noun outfit? Unless you’ve looked it up in a dictionary, all you can say is that the adjective outfitted came from attaching the suffix –ed to either a verb or a noun.
Now here’s a surprise: Some of our unusual adjectives weren’t created this way. One of them is wicked. You might wonder if the word has anything to do with the noun wick, the thing that you burn in a candle or an oil lamp. Actually, no. You can put the –ed suffix on wick, and talk about a /wɪkt/ candle or /wɪkt/ lamp, but in those cases, the word has just one syllable, as you’d expect. According to the OED, the source for wicked is the Old English noun wicca, meaning “wizard.” The feminine form of this word is the source of our word witch. This noun wicca had an adjective form, wick, which picked up an –ed suffix for no apparent reason. So etymologically, a wicked witch is nothing more than a witch-like witch. Objections over how this meaning of wicked evolved to mean “evil” are well-founded, but that’s a bigger topic than we can get into here.
Etymologically, a wicked witch is nothing more than a witch-like witch.
Another example of –ed turning an adjective into a longer adjective is wretched. It comes from an Old English word that’s pronounced basically the same way as the noun wretch is today, except that the w wasn’t silent in Old English. As a noun in Old English, a wretch was an exile, or someone banished from their homeland. As an adjective wretch, it meant what wretched means today, but only gained the superfluous suffix sometime around the year 1200．
An interesting side note is that one of the various spellings of wretched before it settled into its standard spelling was R-A-T-C-H-I-T, a spelling that has been resurrected in present-day African American English as an insult. It’s also spelled R-A-T-C-H-E-T.
So we’ve talked about the suffix –ed attaching to verbs and nouns to produce adjectives, and in odd cases, attaching to other adjectives to produce adjectives. But naked is the strangest case yet, because its –ed ending isn’t a suffix! In Old English, it was nacod, spelled N-A-C-O-D. It wasn’t derived from an existing noun or verb, or even an existing adjective. It was just an indivisible word that meant not having any clothes on. The OED does ultimately trace the word back to a past participial form of a verb, but by the time we get back that far, we’re not talking Old English anymore, or even proto-Germanic; we’re talking Proto-Indo-European, the common ancestor of hundreds of languages of the Old World.
In her book English Words: A Linguistic Introduction (2006), Heidi Harley summarizes the situation with these adjectives by noting that the pronunciation of –ed as its own syllable “was often preserved in words that were common in idioms, poems, or ritual speech, where language learners were more likely to repeat the string exactly as they heard their elders say it” (p. 156). In the end, probably the most accurate thing we can say about these words is that they escaped by historical accident the pronunciation changes that affected other words, but like other irregularities in language, the less they’re used, the more likely they are to fall to regularity.
That segment was written by Neal Whitman, who has a PhD in linguistics and blogs at literalminded.wordpress.com.