Words with ‘ough’ in English

 This is about words such as ‘tough’, ‘brought’ (and words like ‘daughter’), ‘cough’, ‘though’, ‘thorough’, ‘plough’ (or ‘bough’ for Americans). The reason why these words have different sounds is because...they are all different. Bear with me. It is important to remember that for most of our history, most people couldn’t read, and so there was not a direct connection between written and spoken language - written language was not intended to be phonetic.

The original words in Old English were therefore all different because there was no standard written format: ‘bought’ was pronounced like ‘bawhte’, ‘bough’ more like ‘bowh’, ‘thorough’ was ‘thorweh’, while ‘cough’ was ‘cohhian’. Most of these words end in ‘h’ sounds, which in time came to be reproduced as ‘gh’. In addition, -gh was a common way of representing guttural sounds common in Celtic languages (e.g. loch (lake)) in English, and so also applied to strong ‘h’ sounds like in ‘cohhian’/’cough’. Also significant is an event called the Great Vowel Shift at the end of the Middle Ages, which changed the pronunciation of many vowels and caused some consonants to become silent (e.g. the h sound in ‘Bough’).

The shift was probably caused by the influence of French from the continent and the social upheaval of the Black Death. In most cases, spelling didn’t change (although this is why Americans spell the word ‘plow’ rather than ‘plough’). Essentially, the reason, in my view, that they ended up with similar endings is because they all originally ended with a strong ‘h’ sound; then, when scribes started trying to write these words, they looked for similar references to compare them with and tended to standardise spellings despite variations in the vowel sounds. After this, changes in pronunciation over time weren’t matched by changes to the spelling.

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