(tĕmz)
- A river, about 257 km (160 mi) long, of southeast Ontario, Canada, flowing southwest to Lake St. Clair. In the War of 1812 Gen. William Henry Harrison defeated British and Native American forces in the Battle of the Thames (October 5, 1813).
- A river of southern England flowing about 338 km (210 mi) eastward to a wide estuary on the North Sea. Navigable for large ships as far as London, it is the principal commercial waterway of the country. In its upper course above Oxford it is often called Isis.
Word History: The modern spelling of the word
Thames illustrates an interesting phenomenon in the history of the English language. The Thames is first mentioned in English around 893 in King Alfred the Great's
Orosius. At the time it was called the
Temese, a form believed to come from an earlier, unrecorded English
*Tamisa. The spelling
Thames, which first appears in 1649, is an example of the kind of “learned” respelling that went on in English from the late Renaissance through the Enlightenment, when the prestige of Latin and Greek prompted scholars to “correct” the form of many English words. The
a in
Thames is etymologically correct, since the Latin forms had that vowel, but the
h is a “learned” error, added in the mistaken belief that
Thames derived from Greek. Such errors were common, and many words that had nothing to do with Greek were respelled to make them look Greek; two other examples are
author (ultimately from Latin
auctor) and
Anthony (from Latin
Antonius), with the
h added as if these were based on Greek words with a theta (
th) in them. In many cases, the pronunciations of these words changed accordingly, yielding what linguists call a
spelling pronunciation; author is now pronounced with a (th). The pronunciation of
Thames remained unchanged, however, providing an etymologically explicable example of the notorious discrepancy between English spelling and pronunciation.
