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George and Ira Gershwin wrote a little song for the 1937 film Shall We Dance. You likely remember a few of the lyrics:

You like tomayto and I like tomahto…

My wife used to tell me I was a bit of a snob because I pronounced it “tomahto” just like my mom. These days I probably say the two interchangeably.

I guess the word envelope is like that too. Is it an “onvelope” or an “envelope”?

If you look to another English word envelop then clearly the little paper containers should be “envelope”, but the reason people say “onvelope” has history behind it.

This is one of those words that came from French, although it didn’t come back 1000 years ago with the French of the Norman Conquest. It was only about 300 years ago that people started using it in English.

Strange that, because they’d been using envelop since the time of Chaucer 600 years ago.

So this is one of those words that came into English twice from French, each time with a slightly different meaning. People using it likely didn’t recognize it as the same word at all because at first everybody pronounced it “onvelope” since in French the leading E was pronounced like that.

This supposedly new word first shows up in print in a 1707 dictionary called Glossographia Anglicana Nova. This old dictionary’s editor didn’t bother to give us his name although the subtitle is enormously lengthy and invokes the names of many famous people including Isaac Newton, presumably to help boost sales.

The lengthy title also says the Glossographia includes etymologies, however for the word envelope at least it does not. It was 100 years later that theories at least emerged about this etymology. Some pointed back into Latin and others Germanic.

The first definition we have for envelope isn’t a paper container for letters, it’s a military fortification, an earthen wall. Very quickly after that first English appearance the word appeared in a second dictionary by a guy named John Kersey, this time with the “earthen wall” meaning plus a meaning more applicable to our postal system “a cover for anything.”

Before producing his dictionary Kersey put in seven long years as an apprentice to a printer. In those days these long years were unpaid. Kersey would have slept at the print shop and in return for his labor he got food, shelter and an education in the trade that he and other apprentices hoped would mean that later he could have a bunch of apprentices helping him for free in his own business.

There was less specialization in those days and publishers printers and booksellers were all really the same people.

Kersey must have gotten his apprenticeships-worth because he did get an apprentice of his own eventually; his younger brother.

As well as being publisher and bookseller he was an author and editor turning out not only his dictionary but a magazine called Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious. Although it doesn’t sound like it, this was actually an early newsletter of book reviews.