Why Is ‘Colonel’ Pronounced ‘Kernel’?

‘Colonel’ is pronounced ‘kernel’ because English borrowed the word from the 16th-century French coronel (with an ‘r’) and kept that pronunciation even after later switching the spelling back to match the original Italian colonnello. The French had earlier altered Italian colonnello to coronel through dissimilation, a linguistic process that avoids two similar sounds in one word.

We all know that English is an incredibly funny language. From confounding phrases to exceptions for every grammar rule, it’s a pain in the neck for a non-native speaker to even begin to try and understand the language’s many intricacies. However, the sphere in which English ranks pretty much the lowest is pronunciation, thanks to all the silent letters and anarchic spellings littered throughout the text.

I mean, seriously English, why is the letter D in ‘Fridge’ but not in ‘Refrigerator’? Why is ‘Giraffe’ pronounced with a ‘j’ sound and not a ‘g’? Even the word ‘Pronunciation’ is annoying. When you have an O in ‘Pronounce’, why in the hell is it absent from the word ‘Pronunciation’?

That being said, one of the words that truly make any etymologist’s blood boil is the word ‘colonel’. Why in the world does it not follow any set rules? How can a word with two ‘O’s and two ‘L’s sound like ‘Kernel’? Which, let’s not forget, happens to be a completely different word too!

Basically, English has ensured that its speakers get confused between the word for a respected member of the military and another word that means the edible part of a nut. How the British managed to conquer half of the world is downright perplexing.

Clearly, English can be plenty weird, but you can understand it through tough, thorough thought, though.

Nothing in the world is as random as we claim it to be. As it so happens, there is definitely a reason why the word ‘colonel’ is pronounced as ‘kernel’.

Italian Influence On The Word ‘Colonel’

The word was first used around the 15th century, when Europe was dominated by the Italian Renaissance. As they were considered the reigning experts of war at the time, their words, which stemmed from Latin roots, spread all across Europe. The word ‘colonel’ was no exception.

The word stems from the Italian word ‘colonnello’. Fortunately, this word was pronounced exactly how it is written and was derived from the Italian word ‘colonna’ (which in turn came from the Latin word columna), which meant ‘column’. This was because the rank was bestowed upon the commander of a column of troops. To put it simply, ‘colonel’ was related to the column of soldiers in the same way that a ‘brigadier’ is associated with a ‘brigade’.

French Influence On The Word ‘Colonel’

This word was then adopted by the French, but that is where the pronunciation first stumbled. The French, in translating the term in their own language, converted the word ‘colonnello’ to the word ‘coronel’.

Why, you ask?

In linguistics, this is a process called dissimilation – when two instances of the same sound occur close to each other in a word, speakers tend to change one of them to something else to make the word easier to say. Here, the first ‘l’ was changed to ‘r’. The opposite process happened with the Latin word peregrinus, when the first ‘r’ was changed to an ‘l’, which eventually became the English word ‘pilgrim’.

English Influence On The Word ‘Colonel’

So, now we have two variants of the same word. One is Italian, which uses the letter ‘l’, and the other is French, which uses the letter ‘r’. The English and the French have always had a strained but intense relationship with each other. Obviously, it would make sense for the French word to be used by English people first.

Conversely, the Spanish were also pronouncing it the same way, and likely reinforced the spelling through a folk-etymology link with corona (‘crown’) – picturing the colonel as an officer of the crown rather than of the column. The actual root was still the Italian colonna, but both the French and the Spanish pronunciation almost certainly influenced the English one.

The English had already begun to use the word ‘coronel’, which became bastardized by their accent to be pronounced as ‘kernel’, with an open ambiguous ‘r’ in the middle overshadowing the ‘o’. However, by the late 16th century, English scholars began producing translations of old Italian treatises. The effect of the original spelling then started seeping into the English language.

On the one hand, due to this evolution, the French switched back to ‘colonel’, both in spelling and in pronunciation. The English, however, were too linguistically rebellious to do so. They kept pronouncing it the old way, but replaced the official spelling. Go figure!

Seriously, English… You have some explaining to do.

What Does A Colonel Actually Do?

We have spent all this time arguing about how to say the word, but it is worth pausing on what the word actually buys you. A colonel is a senior commissioned officer, and the rank sits surprisingly high up the ladder. In the modern US armed forces, a colonel holds the pay grade O-6: one rung above a lieutenant colonel (O-5) and one rung below a brigadier general (O-7), the first of the general officers.

In the US Army, a colonel typically commands a brigade, a formation of roughly 1,500 to 3,200 soldiers, with a command sergeant major as the senior enlisted advisor. A lieutenant colonel below them runs a battalion of a few hundred. So when the rank was invented, the title was painfully literal: the colonel was the officer at the head of a column of troops. The Italian colonna (‘column’) was not a metaphor; it was the job description.

The insignia tells the same story of compromise that the pronunciation does. In the US system a colonel wears a silver eagle, while the British Army marks the rank with a crown above two pips. Different birds, same rung on the ladder, and the same stubborn little word doing the work in both armies.

Colonel, Kernel, Coronel, Colonial: Sorting Out The Look-Alikes

Part of what makes ‘colonel’ such a menace is the swarm of near-twins it travels with. Let’s untangle them, because they are not all the same kind of relative.

Kernel is the famous trap. It is a true homophone of ‘colonel’ (they sound exactly alike) but the two words are total strangers etymologically. ‘Kernel’ comes from the Old English cyrnel, a diminutive of corn, meaning a little seed or grain. That is why the same word ended up labeling the edible heart of a nut, the popped grain in your popcorn, and even the central program of a computer’s operating system. By the 1550s ‘kernel’ already carried the figurative sense of ‘the core or essential part of anything’, which is exactly why software engineers later borrowed it for the core of an OS. None of that has the faintest connection to a column of Italian soldiers.

Coronel is the opposite case: it looks foreign but is family. It is the old French and Spanish form, the very spelling English borrowed in the 16th century before swapping back to the Italian-looking ‘colonel’. So ‘coronel’ is ‘colonel’ in an earlier outfit, not a different word at all.

Colonial, finally, is the impostor people most often fear they are confusing. It is neither a homophone nor a relative. ‘Colonial’ means ‘relating to a colony’ and is pronounced ‘kuh-LOH-nee-ul’, with four clear syllables and no buried ‘r’. The overlap is purely the first few letters on the page; the ear is never actually fooled.

Colonel Isn’t The Only Word That Misbehaves

If it is any comfort, ‘colonel’ is not a lone weirdo. The very process that mangled it, dissimilation, has quietly reshaped a whole shelf of everyday English words. Whenever two of the same ‘slippery’ sounds (the liquids ‘l’ and ‘r’) sit too close together, speakers tend to nudge one of them away to make the word easier to say.

We have already met pilgrim, where the first ‘r’ of Latin peregrinus softened into an ‘l’, the mirror image of what happened to ‘colonel’. But the shelf is fuller than that. Marble comes from Latin marmor, where the second ‘r’ drifted into an ‘l’. Purple descends from Latin purpura, with the same ‘r’ to ‘l’ slide. In each case English ended up with a spelling that quietly hides a collision its speakers refused to pronounce.

And then there is the rank that sits just one rung below colonel, which has its own pronunciation scandal. Lieutenant literally means ‘place holder’, from the Old French lieu (‘place’) plus tenant (‘one who holds’), an officer who stands in for a superior. Americans say it more or less as it is spelled, but the British and much of the Commonwealth say ‘lef-tenant’, with an ‘f’ that the letters simply do not contain. Spellings reflecting that ‘lef-’ sound go back to the 14th century, but be warned: the popular story that it comes from old confusion between the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ is rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary, which lists the true origin as a genuine mystery. So if ‘colonel’ ever makes you feel foolish, take heart that even the experts are still shrugging at its neighbor. For the wider chaos of letters we write but never say, our piece on how silent letters crept into English picks up the thread.