Search us!

Search The Word Detective and our family of websites:

This is the easiest way to find a column on a particular word or phrase.

To search for a specific phrase, put it between quotation marks.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments are OPEN.

We deeply appreciate the erudition and energy of our commenters. Your comments frequently make an invaluable contribution to the story of words and phrases in everyday usage over many years.

Please note that comments are moderated, and will sometimes take a few days to appear.

 

 

shameless pleading

 

 

 

 

Heinous.

Wor Chester goin’?

Dear Word Detective: Recently the word “heinous” has been turning up on more and more radio and TV newscasts, probably with good reason. Unfortunately the pronunciation of the word is all over the map. I’ve heard “hane-ous,” “heen-ous,” “hine-ous,” and all three with a “-ious” ending. I realize pronunciation isn’t your specialty, but maybe you could tell us something about the word and suggest alternatives for the newscasters who haven’t a clue. — Barney Johnson.

You’re right — “heinous” (defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “hateful, odious; highly criminal or wicked; infamous, atrocious”) seems to be enjoying a grim heyday in the news. A search on Google News produces 2,580 hits (known, by the way, as “Googlits” among Google addicts) in recent news stories. Almost all of them invoke “heinous” in the grave sense the OED suggests (“chiefly characterizing offenses, crimes, sins, and those who commit them”), but I did stumble across one article from an Anchorage, Alaska paper that employed “heinous” to describe a high school tennis team’s 32-year winning streak. Someone up there needs to cut back on the caffeine. “Heinous” does not mean merely “annoying.” Not yet, anyway.

“Heinous” first appeared in print in English in the 14th century, adopted from the Old French “haineus,” from the verb “hair,” meaning “to hate.” A bit further back we find the Germanic root “khatis,” which also gave us our English word “hate.”

It is true that I would not count myself as a pronunciation expert. For one thing, you apparently have to go by three names (“Rupert Frothington Gotrox”) to be one these days, and I’ve always sensed that people who bill themselves in triplicate are trying too hard. But the other reason I don’t want the gig is that pronunciation varies with geography, class, social tradition and many other factors, so proclaiming with certainty a single correct form is a losing proposition.

Charles Harrington Ulster (“The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations”) has, however, made a career of pronouncing (yuk yuk) this sort of judgment, and he mandates the “HAY-nis” version as “the only acceptable pronunciation.” Personally, I go with more of an “us” sound for the second syllable, but we do agree that the word has only two syllables, making “hay-nee-us” as hard to accept as “realtor” rendered as “real-a-tor.” However, and this will probably drive Chuck right over the edge, the standard pronunciation of “heinous” may well change someday. After all, how do you pronounce “Worcestershire”?

4 comments to Heinous.

  • johnducmanis

    It gets Worcester. All those pronunciations have also been heard with the aitch dropped — in fact I vaguely recall some self-pronounced authority saying that it SHOULD be dropped. Unfortunately, that way leads perilously close to a certain impolite orifice and opens the gates to a horde of unsavory puns. (But not to be distressed. Puns are inherently a Good Thing.)

  • Joseph DeMartino

    > “Heinous” does not mean merely “annoying.” Not yet, anyway.

  • I find the pronunciation easy to remember, thanks to the Cole Porter song, Brush Up Your Shakespeare, from “Kiss Me Kate.” The song contains these lines:
    If she says your behavior is heinous,
    Kick her right in the Coriolanus.

  • Garum

    There’s an old joke that claims a customer at a diner first encountered Worcestershire sauce and asked the cook, “wha’s dis here sauce?”

Leave a Reply

  

  

  

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Please support
The Word Detective


unclesamsmaller
by Subscribing.

 

Follow us on Twitter!

 

 

 

Makes a great gift! Click cover for more.

400+ pages of science questions answered and explained for kids -- and adults!

FROM ALTOIDS TO ZIMA, by Evan Morris