Wrat: A paean

to long lost, beautiful words

Mar 05, 2026

black Fayorit typewriter with printer paper

Did you know that in Old English the word we know as write was writan, and its past tense was wrat?

I have only just learned this and am heartbroken. Wrat, it seems to me, puts wrote to shame. It’s forceful, blunt. But jolly, too. Try saying “I wrote a letter” with a waggish smile upon your face; it can’t be done. Now try saying the same thing, but replacing wrote with wrat, and see if you can keep that grin away.

Old English is so called because it’s the earliest recorded version of our language. That’s an interesting statement in itself when you think about it, as it suggests that languages evolve by fits and starts - what evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould called punctuated equilibrium. One day everyone in today’s United Kingdom was speaking some Germanic dialect, and the next day they were up at the bookstore buying Webster’s Fully Illustrated Old English Dictionary (Abridged).

While there may be a skerrick of truth in that picture, anyone living at the time would barely have noticed things changing. For one thing, Old English - whose emergence is generally agreed to have been during the 5th century about the time the Romans began slinking off home - arose from the languages that were already being spoken. To use the evolutionary biology analogy, it’s not like there were dinosaurs one day and mammals the next, but more like dinosaurs one day and slightly different dinosaurs the next.

What’s more, Old English wasn’t, as the name so breezily suggests, a single homogenous language. It had four main dialects - Kentish, Mercian, Northumbrian, and West Saxon - and some lesser dialects to boot. Believe it or not, some of the differences between Old English dialects have persisted to this day. If you pronounce bury to rhyme with berry, you’re drawing on Kentish Old English. If you say bairn instead of child, you’re drawing on Northumbrian Old English.

But I’m rapidly getting out of my depth and risk a serious scholar of English history tracking me down and, justifiably, putting me to the seax. Fair enough. In my university days, I snootily looked down on those English majors who found joy in translating Beowulf and spending hours in the library basement, headphones firmly placed across their ears, listening to all of its 3182 lines spoken in the original tongue. Did they not know that far more interesting things were happening in our age? Had they not heard of Mark Twain, Henry James, Wallace Stevens, Henry Miller, Frank O’Hara or William Melville? Or were they, crime of crimes, too chicken to look contemporary literature in the eye and deal with the complex issues it raised?

What a superior, judgemental prat I was. And how unqualified I now am to speak about English at any time before the late 1800s.

But I do stand by my assertion that wrat is a loss. As are acwellan (to kill), arod (bold), gyse (yes), lofgeorn (eager for praise), manig (many), middangeard (world), and a host of others which the interested reader (especially one with a plagiaristic bent) will find on this handy page.

In fact, and despite my youthful arrogance, listening to Beowulf is an otherwordly experience that no one with any kind of ear should deny themselves. The language has a gorgeous, song-like quality that’s reminiscent of Gregorian chanting (which had its origins in the same period) and gives the lie to the foolish notion that great poetry needs to rhyme. Take a minute to listen to its opening lines and tell me that ain’t so.

What also ain’t ain’t so is that words have always come and gone and are doing so today. In 2025, psychology professor Miles Richardson published a paper tracking the decreasing use of 28 everyday words related to nature, among them bud, meadow and beak. In case you’re thinking this is a function of our device-driven, social media-addicted age, Richardson traced the phenomenon all the way back to 1800.

As if to drive the point home, in 2007 the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which is the go-to in many UK classrooms, removed dozens of entries relating to the natural world, including acorn, bluebell and magpie. The move was pragmatic - it had to make room for 10,000 or so entries for the modern world, like blog, chatroom and MP3 player, the final two of which, less than two decades on, are already looking outdated.

Now you might be wondering what a psychologist is doing publishing a paper on language. Well, my incisive friend, Richardson’s specialty is the “human-nature relationship”. a field in which he advises government agencies around the world (16 countries according to his web profile). He has published two books for the nature-loving hoi polloi, among whom I proudly count myself, Reconnection: Fixing our Broken Relationship with Nature (Spectator Book of the Year for 2023) and The Blackbird’s Song in 2024.

You may also be amused - or bemused - to learn that there are some prescriptivists who insist that saying the hoi polloi is redundant, as hoi is Ancient Greek for the (polloi means people). Its opposite is hoi oligoi, “the few”, also known these days as “the suspected paedophiles”, and I - like so many millions of others - hope and pray that everyone who’s played a part in that unforgivable helpyourself-fest, including those who are now sheltering the perpetrators by any means necessary, is held to account and I don’t care what political party they’re affiliated to or what rotten system will fall apart when the bailiff comes knocking.

We may not be living in the end of times exactly, but a system that allows something like this to happen for so long, unacknowledged, unpunished and actively hidden by powerful people and institutions, is so profoundly flawed that any justification for its continued existence is on shaky ground, is it not? Let it fall apart and let the hoi oligoi fall where they may.

And that’s all she wrat.