Rebracketing: Words We Broke in the Wrong Places

The following is adapted from a book I recently coauthored with Shannon Miller: A Miscellany of Weird & Wonderful Facts for Curious Humans Who Have Nothing Better to Do Than Read (You Know Who You Are). Grab a copy if that dizzying title applies to you.

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When compound words are broken down into components that don’t match up with their etymological sources, it’s called “rebracketing.”

For instance, because we tend to tack the ending -copter on other helicopter-adjacent words like gyrocopter, it’s easy to assume that “helicopter” breaks down into the elements heli + copter, yielding words liky “gyrocopter” and “helipad,” but its actual etymological compontents are more like helico + pter because it’s made up of the Greek elements hélix, meaning “spiral,” and pterón, meaning “wing.”

The “wing” element in helicopter is the same one found in the first part of the word pterodactyl, which literally means “wing finger.” (The silent P in pterodactyl wasn’t silent in Greek, but it is in English due to phonotactics, or rules of pronunciation. To excessively oversimplify, English doesn’t like a P and a T next to each other at the beginning of a word so we pretend the P doesn’t exist when we say it aloud. But phonotactics do allow us to pronounce both P and T in the middle of the word helicopter because the vowels around it give it more comfortable syllabic break.)

The same is true for “-doodle” in dog breeds, which takes the “d” from “Labrador” in “labradoodle,” even when no Labradors are involved. If it weren’t for rebracketing, Fido (a name which, by the way, more or less means “trusty”) could be a Goldenoodle. (Note: Hybrids like Schnoodle and Whoodle are not examples of this phenomenon because they did not take the doo with the oodle. Honorable mention to Maltipoo, which avoids the problem entirely.)

More common examples of rebracketing include…

• Hamburg | er → -burger (yielding, for example, “cheeseburger”)
• Cybern | etics → cyber- (as in “cyberspace”), from the Greek kybernetes “steersman”
• Al | coholic → -holic (as in “workaholic”), from Arabic al-kuhul “kohl”

Also. Have you ever heard the word “nickname” and wondered who Nick is? At first glance you might think, “well, Nick is short for Nicholas so that’s uhh, it. Nick is a nickname—thus, nickname.” But it turns out there is no Nick. There never was a Nick. Nick doesn’t exist. (Sorry, Nick.) 

“Nickname” is from the Middle English phrase an eke name, meaning “an additional name.” This “eke” persists in the phrase “eke out,” which means to stretch one’s resources, to barely get by.

Then we hit the 1400s, when instead of “an eke name,” people heard “a nekename,” which eventually became “a nickname.”

This has happened a good deal with the word “an” when it precedes words that begin with vowels:

• “An apron” was originally “a napron.”
• “An adder” was originally “a nadder.”
• “An auger” was originally “a nauger.”
• “An umpire” was originally “a numpire.”

(By the way, while some people claim that “orange” was a victim of n- rebracketing, suggesting that “a norange” became “an orange,” they are mostly incorrect. There was never any such spelling in English. Although it’s an alteration of the alteration of the Persian- and Sanskrit-derived Arabic naranj, a word for an orange tree before it was a word for its fruit or its color (after all, oranges were originally green), it was Italians who dropped the N. The word narancia became arancia, which became the Medieval Latin pomum de orenge, which became the Old French orange, which was then fruitfully lobbed at English.)