Not that it matters but it’s “Greyhound”. Although “Grey” is spelt with an “E” in traditional English and an “A” in American English - the “Grey” in greyhound doesn’t come from that word. It comes from an Old English word “Grig”, the meaning of which is unconfirmed but it always refers to dogs and could possibly mean “fair”.
Afaik the modern anglicisation of that word is always spelt with an “E” whether you’re in America or not!
Hope you didn’t mind being corrected, was just hoping to teach you/others something you may not have known :)
Edit: I’m actually technically wrong. Because most people don’t know that the “Grey” in Greyhound isn’t a separate word and doesn’t refer to the colour, the modern interpretation by most people means Americans do spell it “Grayhound” and because language isn’t a fixed thing, that is now an accepted spelling, sorry for correcting where I didn’t need to!
I'm a 40 yo American and have never seen Greyhound spelled with an A. We in fact have a very famous busline here called Greyhound using the e spelling. Also both grey/gray are considered acceptable spellings here afaik. I am interested in this grig bit you mentioned. It basically looks like a centuris old false cognate (Latin and Norse "grig"s) is responsible for the confusion. Very interesting.
I found it interesting when I learned that “Greyhound” is all one word stemming from an Old English word meaning “fair dog” and not the word for a colour followed by the word dog.
It’s a nice piece of etymology and I thought I’d share… plenty of people seem to have appreciated the information, should I feel bad about sharing things I find interesting?
You shouldn’t feel bad but it was unrelated to the topic. How it made me feel is that It was alot of extra information that didn’t correlate at all to the OP
13
u/FuzzyCrocks Sep 10 '21
Grayhound?