'Cord' vs. 'Chord'

If there’s one thing we can learn from the history of English words, it’s that spelling is not what it used to be—because spelling didn’t used to matter at all.

Back in the early centuries of English, people pretty much spelled words however they wanted. There was no such thing as the “right” way to spell anything; if it got the point across, that was good enough.

These days, as much as it might frustrate some of us, spelling has pretty much been standardized, and people are much less accustomed to simply sorting out what word they’re looking at just from context. So if we want to communicate as clearly as possible, we do need to pay some attention to what letters we’re using, and in what order, when writing.

One fairly common pair of often confused words when it comes to spelling is “cord” (a length of rope, string or other long thing, usually to tie something up or connect two things together) and “chord” (a set of musical notes played together, hopefully in harmony).

Often, to help us remember how to spell words that sound the same, and look very similar, but mean different things, we can look into the history of those words (also called “etymology”) for clues.

Unfortunately in this case, the history of “cord” and “chord” is of absolute no help whatsoever because the two words are very closely related.

The origins of 'cord' and 'chord' are muddled together

The word “chord” (the musical one) actually comes from the word “accord,” meaning “agreement,” “harmony,” etc. You can think of "accord" as the opposite of “discord.”

“Accord” went through two different linguistic processes on its way to “chord.” The first is called aphesis, which is the process of a word losing an initial (usually unstressed) vowel sound (think how many people use “he looked round” instead of “he looked around” as an example of this). The word for the musical sound was first just "cord" — "accord" minus the first "ac."

The second linguistic process, and it is a very technical term, is “confusion.” Back when spelling didn’t matter, people just threw an H into the word, because there was already a word “chord” in use at the time, which was itself just a different way of spelling the word we now insist gets spelled without an H. The cause of this confusion is that “chord” was often the word used to describe the string of a musical instrument like a lyre or a harp, so it had a musical sense to it already.

So to recap: The word we spell with an H now to specifically refer to the group of...

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