 Welcome to the end note spelling bee. In this mini-series, I'm following up on a question I asked in my video about spelling. What are your spelling pet peeves? Viewer Corey Cook asked why the word one is pronounced like one. The funny thing about this word is that the spelling actually does make sense. It's the pronunciation that's weird. There are actually two issues here, the sound of the vowel and the w sound at the beginning. Let's take it back to the Old English form on. The vowel there is a long a, and typically that corresponds to modern English long o sound. So, for instance, Old English ban becomes modern English bone, and Old English ak becomes modern English oak. And initially, that's the path that Old English on took, with the spelling o and e, making perfect sense if we pronounced it on. In fact, we still see that pronunciation in the words only, literally one like, and alone, literally all one. However, in one of the quirks of regional sound changes that occasionally happen, the non-standard pronunciation one arose in the southwest of England and eventually spread. In addition to the vowel changing from o to a, this pronunciation developed a back glide before the vowel, that w sound. Before the spelling became standardized, there were in fact spellings with w, and both pronunciations seem to have survived until the 17th century. As late as 1685, schoolmaster Christopher Cooper called the one pronunciation barbarous in his grammar of the English language. So in the end, we're left with the spelling of the once standard form, but with the pronunciation of a regional form. By the way, similar shifts happen with other words too, such as oak and oat, which have had regional forms such as wak and wat that didn't become standard. So maybe in those regions, one isn't the loneliest number. I'll be continuing to respond to your comments and suggestions in more Spelling Bee videos intermittently for the next while, in between other main videos. Thanks for all the responses. As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people on the Endless Knot podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms, as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!