Monday, 5 December 2022

Eel and eel

The word eel looks fine in a sentence, but when spelled with a capital e, as in Eel, it looks very strange to me and always has.



What I see is two separate letters, rather than a recognisable diphthong. I first notice this when I heard of the band The Eels and wondered how on earth to pronounce it, before realising it's merely a capitalisation of eels.

Am I alone in having this view?

There are only 18 words in Scrabble that start with ee, and I imagine very few of these would appear at the start of a sentence, so it's possibly just a case of unfamiliarity.

As an aside, the lead of the Eels is Mark Everett, the son of Hugh Everett III, the originator of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum theory.



1 comment:

KevDen said...

Never considered it. However I've recently become acquainted with an artist in Finland called "iisa", I deliberately uncapitalised the first i. Even asking how it is pronounced, I have difficulty.