Rampant Rebracketing

Rebracketing, or as I like to call it, “reb-racketing”, is when words are split in a way that is different from the way they were built. For example, I have rebracketed my my own surname in the logo of this site. I like to think of my name as ⭐🔑, but really, “Starkey” comes from the old Germanic word “stark”, meaning “strong”, with “-ey” added on later. So I intentionally rebracket the name [Stark][ey] as [Star][key].

Rebracketing words often gives us totally new words. For example “burger” is from “hamburger”, which comes from the German town of Hamburg. It can also give us different pronunciations, like “atone”, which is read like “a-tone” but comes from “at one”. In some cases it can even effect the meaning of the word: “outrage” now has a meaning connected to “rage”, but actually comes from “outr+age” (beyond-ness), originally meaning “extra” or “excess”. Because it was mistakenly rebracketed as containing the word “rage”, both the pronunciation and meaning have changed to reflect this.

Here is a collection of words that have been rebracketed to create new words. On the left is the etymology of the word and the original bracketing, and on the right is the rebracketing, with new words that have been created from it.

So now you know: shopaholics are not addicted to shopahol, cheeseburgers are not from the historic German town of Cheeseburg, and the “pter” at the end of “helicopter” is the same as the one at the start of “pterodactyl”.
But do you know where the nicknames “Ned”, “Nancy” and “Nelly” come from?

Why is Ned short for Edward?

One common type of rebracketing is called “false splitting”. This is where two words get rebracketed while remaining as two separate words. For example, the Middle English word for nickname was “ekename”, from “eke”, meaning “additional”. But “an ekename” was taken for “a nekename”, and so the “n” was added to the word.

There are also some nicknames that have arisen from bracketing. For example, in the past, parents would refer to a child called Edward as “mine Ed”, and gradually “n” in “mine” became part of the nickname: Ned.

Here are 9 words that have taken or lost “n”s as a result of rebracketing:

If you enjoyed this comic, check out the others in this series:
Dizzying Doublets
Fantastic False Cognates
Or see find all my creations including more than a dozen linguistics related posts, on my homepage.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, and learned something new, please give my Facebook page a like.
This will encourage me to make more content like this.