Why is there a silent 'w' in TWO?

Isn't it odd how the English word ‘two’ has a silent ‘W’ in it? Especially when all the other numbers that start with a ‘tw’ we pronounce the ‘w’ – twenty, twice, twelve! Can you think of any related words? What do we call two babies born together...? 

It is probably the case that this silent ‘w’ in two became silent over time in spoken English, but not before the written spelling had been fixed (in the 15^th century or so). Hence the ‘W’ is like a spelling fossil, giving us a clue to the pronunciation history of the word. It is connected to the German ‘zwei’ and the Dutch ‘twee’ and going back further in time both actually come from *dwóh.

*Dwóh is two in Proto-Indo-European – a language we linguists have reconstructed based on clues from languages all around Europe and India! I really like this visualisation from Starkey's comics about how so many of our words for 'two' are connected across languages.

When I was an English literature teacher in Scotland, we taught the poem Twa Corbies, which is about two crows deciding where to find their next meal. (It's a bit macabre! Read about it in The Guardian here.) So, in some dialects, you can still hear the 'w' sound in the word for two, which is a little window into how it was pronounced hundreds of years ago in England too.

We look at the links between languages in more detail during one of the sessions in our Children's Languages Adventure. It's 'Pay what you can' for lots of linguistics fun, and if you’d like a free taster click here!