What do these 18 words have in common?

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For the answer, enjoy this 5-minute audio clip from national public radio.

Rather nice and soundbytish. I liked acknowledgement of the alternate Websterian spellings which didn't catch on: sley for sleigh and tung for tongue. There wasn't enough time to go into -ize vs -ise I suppose, though -or vs -our was mentioned by Mr Siegel.

Interesting that "whisky" is included with that particular spelling. I understood that the usual American spelling was "whiskey". Over here, the spirit distilled in Scotland is spelt without an e, and that made elsewhere, such as Ireland or the US, has the e.

Wesbter's 1828 dictionary has: "WHISKY, n. A spirit distilled from grain. In the north of England, the name is given to the spirit drawn from barley. In the United States, whisky is generally distilled from wheat, rye or maiz."

The OED1 has a citation from 1715, and gives both spellings: "whisky, whiskey".

The usually etymology has whisk(e)y derived from Gaelic uisge beatha (into English as usquebaugh) 'water of life', a calque on Latin aqua vitae. So, whisky from the first word in the phrase, meaning 'water'. Cf. Russian vodka 'little water' from voda 'water'; cognate with English water, Greek hydor.

So, if the first Webster's gave the spelling as "whisky", I wonder when "whiskey" started?

The 1828 dictionary was Webster's second one. His first (1806, hence 200th anniversary) is full of quirky spellings, too.

Most of Webster's spellings could be described as "quirky", especially to English eyes!

At a guess, the spelling of "whiskey" came over with the influx of Irish immigrants during and after the Potato Famine of 1845-9.

There's an Irish pub in North Shields which has both "whiskey" and "whisky" produced by Irish distillers on a poster so it seems that they use both, so who knows!