3 Words You Didn’t Realize Were Shortened

Aphaeresis is a fascinating linguistic process where the beginning of a word is clipped off, leaving us with a shortened form that often becomes a word in its own right. This isn’t a modern invention for texting or social media; it’s a natural phenomenon in language evolution happening over centuries. For instance, the word “apron“ originally came from “napron,“ but the initial ’n’ got lost as people mistakenly divided “a napron“ into “an apron.“ Beyond aphaeresis, which involves the loss of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word, there are several other forms of clipping. For example, “apocope“ is a rhetorical term for the omission of one or more sounds or syllables from the *end* of a word.