spelling

-some

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A document quoted someone’s fear of harm from “terrible terrorists” in his country of origin. I commented to a colleague that I’d written a blog post about words like terror (n) – terrify (v) – terrible / terrifying / terrified / terrific (adj) and also awe (n) – awe (v) – awful / awesome (adj) and that we don’t use –some as much as other adjective endings (terrorsome exists but is very rare). He replied that there is a hymn, Let us with a gladsome mind. I responded with another, less well-known hymn O gladsome light, a translation of the ancient Greek hymn Φῶς Ἱλαρόν, phos hilaron, better known as Hail, gladdening light.

I started wondering how many words there are ending in –some. The Free Dictionary lists 272, but we can put three groups of words aside in short order.

The first is those in which –some means body (from Greek σῶμα, sôma), most often in words relating to the cells of biological and botanical bodies. By far the best known of these is chromosome, but The Free Dictionary lists 129 others, from aerosome to virosome. Some of these are very obscure. Pages for Mac recognises only 39 of them. In most cases, the first half of the word is a combining form ending in o-. If I know the meaning of the first half of the word, I might be able to guess at the meaning of the whole, but knowing that megasomes and microsomes are large bodies and small bodies respectively doesn’t help me know of what. 

The second group is those which mean ‘a group of x people or things’, of which The Free Dictionary lists twosome to eightsome and also twasome, which seems to exist only in the name of a specific Scottish dance.

The third is a small number of place and personal names.  

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Spelling/transliteration of Korean place names

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Guangjang Market, Buchchon, Nyongdong, Soul City

Youtube suggested the travel videos of an Australian couple Max and Jacqueline (judging from his accent, he may be South African of origin). The first video I watched was of their two days in Seoul. Youtube videos have a progress bar across the bottom, to which creators can add chapters pinpointing specific moments. (Some videos also have a list or thumbnails in the description.) In travel videos, these are usually changes of locations. I couldn’t help noticing that the four locations listed are all spelled incorrectly, as given above. (I don’t know how and by whom those chapters are added. I’m not pointing fingers at them. They travel a lot and encounter many place names in many language and scripts.)

I don’t expect perfect spelling or pronunciation from travel vloggers (she later mangles Joseon way beyond jo-see-on), but the correct spellings are displayed prominently in each location, are in every travel guide (they consult Google Maps (in English) rather than Naver (in Korean)), and are only ever an online search away.

More interesting than the actual mistakes are considerations of why anyone (or anything) would use these spellings. 과 is gwa in every major transliteration of Hangeul, but then there’s Guangzhou in China (which is never Gwangzhou). I suddenly wondered whether the names Guangzhou in China and Gwangju in Korea are related. No and yes. Guangzhou is 广州 (broad province) (compare Guangdong province) and Gwangju is 光州 (light province). The ㄱ of 북촌 is usally k, but then there’s German Buch (which represents a different sound). Nyongdong is just plain wrong. I can live with o rather than eo in the first syllable but there’s no way that ㅁ can be n. She pronounces it correctly, and there is an onscreen graphic in both hangeul and English. Finally, 서울 is never Soul, though it used to be Sŏul. There are very few usages of Soul City anywhere online, but those include churches and locations related to popular African-American music.

I once saw Hyeondae Market, which looked wrong, but is actually correct Revised Romanisation. The car manufacturer (pre-RR) is idiosyncratic by any transliteration system.

Dancing with the czars

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A few days ago, an Australian news website stated that Trump’s border tsar was going to Minneapolis. Another stated that Trump’s ‘border czar’ was going to Minneapolis.

I am far more familiar with the spelling tsar, and would only ever use either to refer to eastern European monarchs (tsar for Russian and czar for south Slavic), not people holding positions of power in US politics or public life. 

Czar is the earlier spelling (from Latin caesar (classically pronounced with a /k/, compare German kaiser)) and was more used until about 1900. The two spellings traded usage for most of the 20th century, then tsar has been the most common since about 1990. If anything tsar refers to Russian monarchs (compare Russian Царь) and czar refers those people in US politics or public life. With the resources I have access to, I can’t find when when czar was first used in that way. US industrial magnates and the Russian monarchy overlapped by several decades (compare also ‘barons of industry’).

I have never knowingly encounteredczar in reference to Australia or any other country. (Wikipedia says US and UK.) The second website saw fit to use inverted commas around the phrase. I can’t immediately think what term we would use in Australia to refer to a person of equivalent power. Maybe, fortunately, we don’t have (m)any, as the Australian prime minister has less power to make such appointments. Intriguingly, most similar words come from other languages: boss (Dutch), supremo (Italian or Spanish), honcho (Japanese) and mogul (Persian or Arabic). ‘White House Border Czar’ seems to be Tom Homan’s actual title (Wikipedia, citing the Annual Report to Congress on White House Office Personnel, 1 July 2025). The first news source has a further article in which the commentator writes “The ‘White House Border Tsar’ (yes, that is his actual title)”. 

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Reknown

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An article on a major open-source site included two references to either “a renown actor” or “a reknown actor” (or some other artistic occupation). I didn’t save the quotation or URL, and have forgotten the exact article, but that doesn’t stop me investigating and speculating. If I have encountered this before, I haven’t noticed it. I also haven’t used renowned in any of my posts here.

Both are wrong. Renown is a noun. A noun can modify another noun. We talk about a movie actor or a stage actor, but not about a fame actor (it’s got to be a famous actor). Reknown isn’t a word, but if is was, it would be an adjective; compare “a known actor”. (Pages for Mac and WordPress both red-underline it.)

Renown isn’t about being known, well-known or re-known. It comes from Old French renom (noun) and renomer (verb) to make famous, and Latin re- + nōmināre to name. Renowned people are re-named, not re-known.

Not surprisingly, there are examples around. Dictionary.com has five example sentences for renown, one of which uses it as an adjective: “Even amid Welsh rugby’s renown tribalism, this news will not have been celebrated by regional rivals” (the BBC, no fewer). Google Ngrams shows reknown expert, scientists, artist, experts, although at lower usage than renowned scholar, author, artists, city, warrior, men, general, hero, name, knight. Its results for “renown_ADJ *_NOUN” are garbled; the first result is renown hath, which is clearly noun + verb. A general Google search shows widespread results for “renown actor”, including major sites and enough results for “reknown actor” to say that it’s out there. 

So will either renown actor or reknown actor become standard, alongside or instead of renowned actor? I doubt it. The word just doesn’t have enough usage, alongside renowned,  famous and other synonyms. I can see why people would use either or both, though.

I’m also puzzled by how renown (noun) became renowned (adj) without renown (verb) in between (renowned is, at face value a past-participle verb). There’s also famed, but the verb to fame did exist (and famed is less common than famous). If the verb to renown existed, I can’t find any reference to it. Maybe the fact that there’s a Latin and French verb in the history is enough.

PS 1 March: a document I edited at work referred to an ‘unknow woman’, which I can immediately and confidently say is a mistake.

Κιμπερλυ

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A man in a train had a large tattoo on the outside of his forearm reading Κιμπερλυ. I could decipher Kimperly and assumed that was meant to be the name most often spelled Kimberley (more often a female name and less often male). Greek has both π (p) and β (b), so I would spell it Κιμβερλυ (or Κιμβερλι). Google’s first result for Κιμβερλυ is Ελληνική Βικιπαίδεια (Greek Wikipedia)’s page for Κίμπερλι Γκίλφοϊλ (Kimberley Guilfoyle, the US Ambassador to Greece) (spelled with π). Elsewhere there are occurrences of Κιμπερλυ, Κιμβερλυ, Κιμπερλι and Κιμβερλι, so there is no settled transliteration and this man’s Κιμπερλυ is not immediately a mistake. (Chinese character tattoo fails are well-attested, but I even less knowledge of Chinese characters and couldn’t decipher them on a train.)

IGIN, gin and Jin

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In Seoul, I saw many advertisements for the products of a company called IGIN, including fruit tonics and fruit gins. So is IGIN pronounced as in ‘gin’ or as in ‘begin’? In English, it’s impossible to say (see also the debate about ‘gif’). But the hangeul text underneath clearly shows that it is as in ‘begin’, being spelled 아이긴 (a-i-gin). In hangeul there is no ambiguity – either it’s ㄱ (g) or ㅈ (j) and there’s no way that ㄱ is ever pronounced ㅈ (though sometimes it’s pronounced closer to k).

Another ad has Jin from BTS (the only way I knew that was that his name appears under his photo) spruiking Jin Ramen, with the text saying something like (in Korean) “Does Jin like Jin Ramen?” “진짜!”

Further research shows that there is a connection: Jin is the co-founder of IGIN. Calling it 아이진 would have been a double pun on his name and the product.

Kangaroo powder

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I noticed a packet of 콩가루 (kong-ga-ru) on the kitchen table. For all the world that looked like it should be kangaroo, but obviously wasn’t. I asked my wife, who told me that it is soybean powder (Wikipedia’s article about the Japanese equivalent). Kangaroo is 캥거루 (kaeng-geo-ru). (I would spell it 캥가루, kaeng-ga-roo). The first recorded spelling is kanguru (Sir Joseph Banks, 12 July 1770) and the reconstructed Guugu Yimithirr spelling is gangurru, referring to eastern grey kangaroos.

Adapting a recent comment on another post: If we don’t know the Guugu Yimithirr rules of pronunciation, we shouldn’t try to use Guugu Yimithirr words.

A military coupe

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A document referred to a “military coupe”, which is either a classic car used by the generalissimo or a typo. Coup (koo), coupe and coupé are ultimately related, meaning “strike, cut” from French coup, couper, colp, Late Latin colpus, Latin colaphus, and Ancient Greek κόλαφος, kólaphos. A coupé (which was a carriage before it was a car) is “cut off” compared to a sedan of the same make  and a coup d’état (now more often simply a coup) is a strike against the state. 

I would pronounce coupé as koo-pay, but would be genuinely uncertain how to pronounce coupe with no further context. While coupe cars aren’t part of my personal experience, I am familiar enough with the koop pronunciation via The Beach Boys and Simon and Garfunkel (first)/Chuck Berry (later). (Tangentially, I once knew someone with the surname Coupe, pronounced kowp.)

A Google search for “military coupe” (in quotation marks for an exact match) first asks if I mean “military coup” (not right now), then shows a scattering of results from semi-official news sources, referring on the first page to Myanmar, Ivory Coast,  Papua New Guinea and Burkina Faso.

any thing, any where, any time

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A removalist’s van promises to move “any thing, any where, any time”. 

There are intriguing similarities and differences between any thing, any where and any time, and anything, anywhere and anytime. They each began as two words, but anything and anywhere are now much more common (and any where is very uncommon), but any time is still moderately more common than anytime. (In many contexts, there is a strong progression from two words to hyphenated, to one word.)

Each can be used as a pronoun or adverb, but there are constraints on each. Test yourself with these (some of which are ungrammatical and some questionable):

Any thing/Anything you read on this blog is interesting.
You can read any thing/anything on this blog.
You can read this blog anything. 
Is this blog any thing/anything like Language Log?
Any where/anywhere you read this blog is interesting.
You can read any where/anywhere on this blog.
You can read this blog any where/anywhere.
Is this blog any where/anywhere near as good as Language Log?
Any time/Anytime you read this blog is interesting.
You can read any time/anytime on this blog.
You can read this blog any time/anytime. 
Is this blog any time/anytime like Language Log?

Thing and time are both nouns, but while any thing/anything is more likely to be used as a (pro)noun, any time/anytime is more likely to be used as an adverb. Where is an adverb, and anywhere is, not surprisingly, more likely to be used as an adverb. 

I searched my blog post draft document and found 179 instances of anything (including those in this post), and one of any thing, a quotation from the King James/Authorised version of the Bible: “If ye shall ask any thing in my name”; and 45 of anywhere and none of any where apart from this post. My usage of any time and anytime is less common, and mixed, tending towards any time: 

I wasn’t going to get back to sleep any time soon
a book about whaling at any time up to the mid-20th century 
A captain can switch the bowlers around at any time. [This was actually for a Facebook comment after an American friend expressed her perplexity about cricket (despite her mother having been Australian, and her spending some time in Australia in her youth).]
it sounds remarkably optimistic of Koreans to say so at any time
[it’s] presumably not going to go away any time soon
One [Greek student] especially said “Oooh, is Greek word” any time we encountered a Greek word
I can now usually find almost any song from almost any time
I won’t be taking a flight to Sydney any time soon.
A real enlightened teacher is intense and they could care less what you think about anything at any time since you are lost in illusions. Frederick Lenz [A quotation]
So, could care less is out there, and isn’t going away any time soon.

and, conversely:

Not that I’m likely to be in a position to call her anything anytime soon.

Clearly, anything and anywhere are now standard, and any time/anytime is still in a state of flux (though at any time is a fixed expression). I can’t give you any definitive advice between any time and anytime without more research and thought.

Another removalist’s van promises “MOVE YOUR FURNITURE IN VERY AFFORDABLE PRICE”.