Aaron Murdock

ENGL 3020
Midterm Paper

A Brief History of English Contractions and Their Use

Contractions in modern English are most often considered to be the combination of

“auxiliary verbs with particles indicating negation or with pronouns found in verb phrases”

(Hickey 7). Mohr (285) clarified this when he explained that negative verb phrases have the

word not preceded by can, must, should, would, ought, or forms of the verbs be, have, and do

(and I would add the word could). He also said that there is a nominal type of contraction that

involves be, will, or have and a nominal, like a pronoun. After all, take apart a word like there’s

and it becomes there is. However, while taking apart the word won’t and turning it into will not,

where does the “o” come from (from an old spelling of will as woll)? Similarly, there is no

combined form of am not used in Standard English, but in Ireland and Scotland, amn’t is

commonly used where others would say aren’t, such as in the common phrase “aren’t I?”. Mohr

said there are two main assumptions made about contractions in English: Each contraction has a

non-contracted syntactic equivalent, and non-contracted words are semantically equal to their

contracted forms (285).

These types of questions and considerations about contractions came up as I started

looking more into what makes a contraction, why some’re accepted in formal usage and others

aren’t, and where contractions came from. A Google search for the history of contractions in

English yielded very little from which to glean information. Indeed, even scholarly sources had

few results having to do with grammar; most were about muscle contraction. While I did find

some postings about contractions, the authors often didn’t post primary sources and therefore the

information couldn’t be trusted.

 English contractions are considered informal and colloquial by many, particularly in

academic circles. John Hendrickson, professor of humanities at Snow College, considered such a

belief to have very little evidence. He wrote in his article “A Question about Contractions: Are

All of ‘em Colloquial?” that it was 18th century prescriptivist grammarians who decided that

contractions were informal and should be avoided in any formal writing, and that modern

linguists and grammarians have carried on the tradition (Hendrickson 46). He explains that

contractions, abbreviations, and some compound words in writing came about as a result of court

scribes needing to transcribe minutes and notes quickly and were used to save time and space,

forming what we now call “shorthand”. English court scribes, starting in the 14th century, started

to use “Court-Hand”, which is where we get such things as “Xmas” standing in for “Christmas”

and “Sr.” for “Sir” (47). However, these shortened versions were not meant to be pronounced the

way they appeared, but as the full word, just as we’d do when reading aloud the name “Mr.

Hendrickson”.

A blogger named Conor Reid, who kept up a blog called “Historically Irrelevant” until

2017, wrote a post about compound words found in Old English . He wrote, “Nis is the

contraction of ne is (meaning “is not”) and naefde from ne haefde (meaning “did not have”).”

The next example he gave was naes from ne waes, which means “was not”. He suggests that in

the modern vernacular nis has become isn’t and naes has become wasn’t. Reid then moves on to

Middle English, using the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer as an example of more compounded

words, which he continues to refer to as “contractions.” Around the end of the 16th century,

when Shakespeare was writing his plays, Middle English became Modern English with a

vocabulary closer to what we now use. Shakespeare uses quite a number of contractions in his

writing, such as in the very first lines of “Hamlet”:

 Barnardo: Who’s there?

Francisco: Nay answer me: Stand and unfold your selfe.

Later lines use “‘tis” a number of times, as well as “who’s” and “‘twill”. It seems that by

the time Shakespeare was writing in the mid-to-late 1600’s, contractions had become a part of

common writing.

As mentioned, it was in the late 1700’s that grammarians decided that contractions in

general weren’t to be used in formal speech and writing (Hendrickson 46), despite their usage

since early English. As English spread to various parts of the globe, more contractions sprang up

while many died off. “Amn’t” died off in England and America, but stayed in common usage in

Ireland and Scotland.

There is one contraction that has been argued over for generations: “Ain’t”. Donaher and

Katz (4) explain that “Ain't entered the written language before the process of codification was

entirely under way: the whole industry of printing, editing, dictionary making, and language

punditry had yet to coordinate itself in ways that would, over the course of the 18th century, lead

to the growing standardization of spelling in the language of formally educated folk….”

Donaher claims in her book that dictionaries have failed to explain why ain’t and other

contractions are vilified despite being commonly used by the upper and middle classes in the late

18th century (16). Hendrickson was of the opinion that contractions should not be vilified simply

because 18th century proscriptions cast hate upon them (48). I believe both authors would agree

with me when I say that I believe contractions ought to be accepted in formal writing and
conversation. Well, most of them. I don’t know that even I would justify the use of shouldn’t’ve

in writing.

Works Cited

Donaher, Patricia, and Seth Katz, editors. Ainthology: the History and Life of a Taboo Word.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.

Hendrickson, John. “A Question about Contractions: Are All of 'Em Colloquial?” College

Composition and Communication, vol. 22, no. 1, Feb. 1971, pp. 46–48.,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/356528.

Hickey, Raymond. “Early Modern English.” Oct. 12AD, pp. 1–9., www.uni-

due.de/ELE/Early_Modern_English_(language_notes).pdf.

Mohr, Eugene V. “The Independence of Contractions.” TESOL Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 4, Dec.

1969, pp. 285–289., http://www.jstor.org/stable/3586120.

Reid, Conor. “The History of Contractions.” Historically Irrelevant, 25 Feb. 2011,

historicallyirrelevant.com/post/3505130893/the-history-of-contractions.