When exploring the vittles meaning, we find a word often associated with the rural South, cowboys, pioneers, mountain men, and the like. The word comes from Middle English, via French. It is sometimes suggested that victuals is the proper way of saying vittles and that vittles is simply a vulgar misspelling of a more refined word, but the history of the word in English and French tells a different story. Vittles is a shortened and simplified spelling of the Middle English word vitailles, which arrived via the Old French word of the same spelling. It has been used in English since at least the early 1300s.
What is the meaning and origin of “vittles”?
🤠 Quick Answer: Vittles is a 700-year-old English word meaning “food prepared for consumption.” While it is often mistaken for a slang version of victuals, it is actually the original phonetic spelling. In the 1300s, scholars tried to “Latinize” the spelling to victuals to match the Latin victualia, but the pronunciation stayed exactly the same.
The word vitailles was in use when it was discovered that the original origin of the word was the Latin word victualia. This led some to imagine that a ‘proper’ course of action would be to respell ‘vitailles’ as ‘victailles’, which became the curious word ‘victuals’, supposedly the proper spelling of ‘vittles’.
Vittles actually remained the most common use of the term, but the confused etymology caused many to think that vittles had been a misspelling and mispronunciation of victuals, which is pronounced without the ‘C’ as VIH-tuhl.
🐇 No Rabbit in Welsh Rarebit: The “victuals” vs. “vittles” confusion is a classic case of people trying to “fix” a word that wasn’t broken. A similar thing happened with Welsh Rabbit, which was mockingly renamed Welsh Rarebit to sound more refined. And because people hate bunnies. Read the full story behind the name here.
Why do we add silent letters to English words?
This practice of attempting to refine English by aligning words with their supposed Latin etymons is actually fairly common and is yet another way that English spelling can be so confusing, as unnecessary letters are added to “Latinize” English words. Often, this consists of adding a silent letter.
Just for curiosity’s sake, here is a list of other words that were Latinized. For the first words in the list, the pronunciation of the words never changed, only the spelling. Here are some other examples:
- dette to ‘debt’ to match Latin debitum and dubitare
- sisours to ‘scissours’ to scissors to match Latin scissor
- langage to ‘language’ to match Latin langua
- receite to ‘receipt’ to match Latin receptum (the word recipe came from receipt)
- samon to ‘salmon’ to match Latin salmo
- quire to ‘choir’ to match Latin chorus
- aventure to ‘adventure’ to match Latin adventura (pronunciation changed to pronounce the ‘d’)
- avis to ‘advice’ to match Latin advisum (‘d’ pronounced)
- perfeit to ‘perfect’ to match Latin perfectus
