# Great Vowel Shift **Domain:** Linguistics / History of English **Doc Type:** Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition The **Great Vowel Shift** was a series of changes to the long vowels of English, roughly between 1400 and 1700. Long vowels rose in the mouth, and the highest became diphthongs: *bite* moved from a sound like "beet" toward its modern pronunciation, and *house* from something like "hoose." Spelling had largely settled before the shift finished, which is why English letters and sounds so often disagree. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen gave the change its name. ## Corpus Context The shift is a vivid example of the long-to-short and long-to-diphthong vowel movement Bryant McGill follows when pivoting sounds; it shows how far a word's vowel can travel while the word stays itself. See [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. ## Relationships - **Process family:** [[wiki/Sound Change|Sound Change]]. - **Vowel patterns:** [[wiki/Ablaut|Ablaut]]. - **Practice:** [[wiki/Phonetic Etymology|Phonetic Etymology]]. - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph. ## Sources - Otto Jespersen, *A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles*, part 1 (1909). ## See Also [[wiki/Phonetics|Phonetics]] · [[wiki/Etymology|Etymology]]