by Todd DePastino

Every one of us, when we were first learning to read, ran across the word “colonel” and pronounced it the way it looks, “kol-o-nell.” We were, of course, immediately corrected.

“It’s pronounced ‘kernel.’”

Maybe we asked how an “r” sound infiltrated “colonel.” If we did, we were left unsatisfied, because the answer is something of a mystery. And it’s complicated.

The origin of colonel is simple enough. It comes from the Italian colonna, meaning column. A colonnello, then, was the head of a large group or column of soldiers.

If history were as linear and orderly as a column of soldiers, we would have received the word “colonel” unadulterated. It would be pronounced as it looks, “kol-o-nell.”

But, at the same time that early modern Italians were organizing their armies into columns, the Spanish were also. Remember, this was the age of nation building, when the smaller kingdoms of Europe—like Aragon and Castille—were consolidating into unified states—like Spain. Armies were getting bigger, and new labels were needed for the expanded tables of organization.

The Spanish also called their colonel-led units of soldiers “columns”—colunelas, in Spanish. And the leader of each colunela was a cabo de colunela, column head.

But, then, in a nod to the newly expanded powers of the monarchs, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and their successors, the Spanish started referring to these large formations of soldiers as coronelas, derived from the word corona, for crown.

The word coronelas marked the armies as the king’s men, rather than a local militia loyal to a duke or lord. The persons in charge of these new national armies were coronels, representatives of the crown.

By the 1600s, there were two competing western European words for what we call a colonel, collonnello and coronel, and they were confusingly similar. Swap out a Spanish “r” for an Italian “l”—or vice versa–and it’s the same word.

Good thing we had France to break the tie.

King Henry II of France seemed to settle the matter by referring to his regimental or battalion chiefs as colonnels, from colonne, the French word for column.

The English, then, adopted the French term, and voila!, we have “colonel.”

But the story doesn’t end there.

Although by the late 1500s, the French written custom was to call a high-ranking army officer a colonel or colonnel, a simultaneous spoken convention survived in which a colonel was called a coronel, again, with reference to the crown.

Both practices migrated across the English Channel and settled into two separate traditions, one written and one spoken. Instead of unifying the two, our English language kept them both and handed us this confounding quirk of pronunciation.

I have a pet theory as to why, but I can’t prove it. The theory has to do with the Protestant Reformation, literacy rates, and the English Civil War.

Martin Luther declared sola scriptura as one of Protestantism’s founding principles: only by reading Scripture can one come to know God.

Protestants, then, had far higher literacy rates than Catholics in early modern Europe because their religion commanded them to read the Bible.

Religious war cleaved England in the 1640s, as the Protestant Parliamentary Puritan Roundheads took on the High Church Anglican (quasi-Catholic) pro-Crown Cavaliers.

The vast majority of the Cavalier soldiers fighting for King Charles I couldn’t read or write. And they were sworn to the King. Thus, they used the term “coronel.”

The Puritan forces in the New Model Army, the first real professional army in England, were virtually all literate and educated by books in the art of war. They were fiercely opposed to the monarchy, thus used the term “colonel” to denote their leaders.

The war would end, King Charles I would be executed, but his eldest surviving son would come back with a vengeance in 1660. The tumult returned, and the whole matter was eventually settled in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, glorious because it shed little blood, restored a Protestant King and Queen, and affirmed Parliament’s ultimate supremacy.

Almost as a nod to the negotiated revolutionary settlement, both “colonel” and “coronel” survived, one in written form, the other spoken.

That’s how the English language snuck an “r” sound into the pronunciation of “colonel.”

Now, if we can only figure out why the Brits pronounce “lieutenant” as “leff-tenant.”.