The Great Vowel Shift is the reason bite, beet and boot are spelt the way they are and sound the way they do. Around 1400 a Londoner said bite with the vowel we now use in beet, beet with something close to the vowel of bait, and boot with the vowel of boat. Over the next two or three centuries every long vowel moved, the spelling did not, and English was left with letters that record how Chaucer spoke.
EdCitation publishes this guide, built from a University of Pennsylvania handout, the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, the OED's history pages, a Furman University teaching site and linguists' published work, read in full or in abstract on 27 September 2026. Where we read a scholar only as quoted by another, we say so.
For a paper on it, three free EdCitation tools handle the sources: Find sources for the linguists' papers, Cite a source for an APA 7 entry taken from each paper's record, and Verify references for a last look at your list. The final section runs the first two on this topic. For the wider story of English, read a short history of English.
What was the Great Vowel Shift?
The Great Vowel Shift changed the long vowels of English and left the short ones alone. Each long vowel was said with the tongue a step higher, and the two that were already as high as they could go, the vowels of bite and about, became diphthongs, glides of two sounds. Short vowels, as in bit or but, were not part of it.
The seven long vowels, word by word
Ringe (n.d.), a University of Pennsylvania handout, follows seven words through four stages. The first and last are below, with a middle stage. Ringe writes small capital I and U; we give them as ɪ and ʊ.
| Word | About 1400 | About 1600 | Today | What the spelling kept |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| bite | biːtə | bəit | baɪt | The i of a vowel pronounced "ee" |
| beet | beːt | biːt | biːt | ee for the close long e |
| beat | bɛːtə | beːt ~ biːt | biːt | ea for the open long e |
| abate | abaːtə | əbeːt | əbeɪt | The a of a vowel like "ah" |
| boat | bɔːt | boːt | boʊt | oa for the open long o |
| boot | boːt | buːt | buːt | oo for the close long o |
| about | abuːtə | əbəut | əbaʊt | ou for the long u, an "oo" sound |
In Ringe's transcription the unstressed final -ə of 1400 is gone by 1500. The third column shows a detail that matters for spelling: about 1600, beat could still sound different from beet. The two only merged later, and ea and ee are the record of that old difference (Weiner, n.d.).
The words that escaped
Not every long vowel shifted. Ringe (n.d.) notes that the oo vowel did not become a diphthong before a consonant made with the lips, which is why coop, droop, loop, troop and tomb still have it. Great and break went their own way, keeping a vowel like bait where breach and cream have ee. And the vowel of beat was shortened before d, t and th in words such as bread, dead, head, sweat and death, so their ea now spells a short e.
When did the Great Vowel Shift happen?
Most accounts place the Great Vowel Shift between about 1400 and 1700, but the scholars we read do not agree, and one argues that it began almost two centuries earlier. Prichard (2014) opens by saying that after more than a century of debate the chronology "is still unclear".
| Source | When they date the shift |
|---|---|
| Menzer (2000e), Furman University | The fifteenth to the eighteenth century |
| Ringe (n.d.), University of Pennsylvania | Traced from about 1400, through 1500 and 1600, to today |
| Macafee and Aitken (2002), Dictionaries of the Scots Language | In Midland and southern English, beginning in the fourteenth or fifteenth century; the front vowels of Scots shifted through the fifteenth and sixteenth |
| Weiner (n.d.), Oxford English Dictionary | Long i probably pronounced [əi] in the sixteenth century; spelling out of step with speech by then |
| Stenbrenden (2016), Cambridge University Press | Its changes began in the mid-thirteenth century at the latest |
| Glauser (2017), University of Heidelberg | The north of England before the south |
Did it start in the thirteenth century?
Stenbrenden (2016) says so, on the evidence of spellings in medieval texts that can be placed on the map. The rise of the beet vowel to "ee" is usually dated to about 1400, but the book's summary of chapter 4 puts its start around the middle of the thirteenth century at the latest. Its conclusion goes further: counting the earlier changes to the long vowels that the handbooks treat as separate, any Great Vowel Shift spans 700 to 800 years. We read the chapter summaries, not the chapters. In 2025 Stenbrenden noted that the shift has more recently also been called the "Long Vowel Shift" (Stenbrenden, 2025).
Who named the Great Vowel Shift?
The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen gave the Great Vowel Shift its name, in 1909, on page 231 of the first volume of his Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles, the volume on sounds and spellings (Glauser, 2017). Menzer (2000e) captions his portrait "Discoverer" of the shift, in quotation marks, and the quotation marks are deserved: Karl Luick had set out the connected changes in 1896, and the argument that followed began with both men (Prichard, 2014).
We could not open a scan of Jespersen's 1909 volume, so the page number comes from Glauser, not from our own reading.
Why did the Great Vowel Shift happen?
Nobody knows. Prichard (2014) reports that scholars have failed to agree on its cause, its chronology or its mechanism.
Pull chain or push chain
Jespersen, pointing to similar changes in other Germanic languages, thought the high vowels moved first: bite and about became diphthongs, and the vowels below rose into the gaps, a pull chain or drag chain. Luick argued the reverse, a push chain: the vowels of beet and boot rose first and crowded the high vowels out. His evidence was northern English, where the oo vowel had moved forward earlier, the vowel of house never became a diphthong, and so nothing had pushed it (Prichard, 2014). Prichard's own maps of the Survey of English Dialects support Luick.
Was it one event at all?
Some linguists doubt it. In a 1988 paper we could not read, Stockwell and Minkova called the shift "the linguist's creation through hindsight", as quoted by Prichard (2014); Lass, defending its unity in 1992, called the traditional picture "too valuable to discard", also quoted there. Johnston in 1992 and Smith in 2007 proposed two shifts, one northern and one southern. Stenbrenden (2016) concludes that nothing spread over seven centuries can be a single coherent event, and that the explanation should be sought in ordinary sound processes (raising, diphthongisation, fronting) that can be studied in living languages.
What we could not confirm
Popular accounts online tie the shift to migration into London after the Black Death. We found no scholarly source we could read that makes that argument, so we report it only as a popular claim, unconfirmed.
Why is English spelling not phonetic after the shift?
English spelling is not phonetic largely because it settled while the vowels were still moving. Weiner (n.d.) dates the gradual regularising of spelling to between 1475 and about 1630, and says that by the mid-seventeenth century printed words looked much as they do now. Printing, in Weiner's account, fixed spelling in its late Middle English form just as sound changes transformed pronunciation.
The letters were not arbitrary when they were chosen. Before the shift, the vowel letters had values close to their Latin and continental ones, so English spelling was reasonably phonetic. It even gained distinctions during the change: ee and e-plus-final-e came to mark the close long e and ea the open one, and oa was introduced in the sixteenth century on the model of ea (Weiner, n.d.). When the two e vowels merged, meet and meat kept their separate spellings for one sound.
Menzer (2000b) adds the timing: the shift coincided with a growing wish to standardise English, so written English stopped following speech. How Caxton and the London printers chose their spellings is told in a short history of English, why no academy ever reformed them in who decides what is correct English, and how the OED's readers copied old spellings exactly in the OED and its volunteers.
How did Middle English pronunciation sound?
Middle English pronunciation gave the long vowels their continental values, and poets' rhymes are the evidence. Menzer's Furman pages show three periods:
- Chaucer, before the shift. In the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales, roote ("root") has a long o that later rose to "oo", and breeth and heeth ("breath" and "heath") rhymed; breath shortened before the shift, while heath rose with it (Menzer, 2000a).
- Shakespeare, in the middle of it. Falstaff's "If Reasons were as plentie as Blackberries" in Henry IV, Part 1 is a pun on raisins, because reason still had a vowel near that of raisin; Menzer (2000d) takes it from Helge Kökeritz's Shakespeare's Pronunciation.
- Pope and Dryden, near the end. Pope rhymed obey with Tea in The Rape of the Lock (1714), and Dryden rhymed sea with obey, because the ea vowel had risen only one step. The nursery rhyme Polly Put the Kettle On rhymes tea with away for the same reason (Menzer, 2000c).
Did the Great Vowel Shift happen in Scots and northern English?
Only in part. The front vowels shifted in Scots and the north, but the back vowels mostly did not.
Scots
Macafee and Aitken (2002), in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language, explain why. Older Scots had already moved its oo vowel forward (as in gude, "good"), so there was no vowel to push the oo of words such as cow, clout and croun ("crown"), and Older Scots underwent no shift of the long back vowels beyond small changes of quality. The long front vowels did shift, through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the beet vowel had risen to nearly "ee" by the middle of the fifteenth, and the diphthong of bite apparently began only after about 1400.
Northern England
Prichard (2014) finds the same pattern in England north of a line from the River Ribble to the Humber: the front vowels shifted completely, but many dialects kept the Middle English "oo" in words like house. Diphthongs found there came in later from the south. Glauser (2017), in a conference abstract, reads northern place-name spellings as evidence that the shift reached the north before the south.
Is there a second Great Vowel Shift?
Bauer (1979) argued that one was under way: its abstract claims English was going through a vowel shift similar in effect to the fifteenth-century one, with evidence from twentieth-century descriptions of English and its varieties. Matthews (1981) replied that Bauer had "let his imagination run away with him", mistaking similar changes in separate accents for one shift. Bauer revisited the idea in 1992. We read the two abstracts, not the papers.
How do you research and cite the Great Vowel Shift?
Read the linguists, take each reference from its record, and check the list last. For the references, EdCitation is the best tool, because it looks each one up in the record and composes none of them, so a reference it gives you is a record, not a guess. Even a publisher's record can carry a stray number, as the second run below shows, and a looked-up entry lets you see it. EdCitation never writes any part of anyone's work; the argument and every sentence stay yours.
- Search the linguistics. EdCitation's free Find sources covers about 300 million published works; type a topic, or the claim a sentence has to back, and narrow by years, open access or kind of source (a book chapter, say).
- Collect the books. Look up Stenbrenden's book by title in the Library, find a copy in a library near you, and keep it in My Books; with Max, $24 a month (pricing), read or borrow from over 5 million books.
- Make each entry in Cite a source, free: paste a DOI, a title, an ISBN or an address and choose one of six styles (APA 7, MLA 9, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver, or Chicago 18 in its author-date form). Each source is screened for retraction.
- Test the whole list in Verify references, also free. Every entry is marked verified, "check this" or not found, a retraction is flagged, and an entry the check could not reach is reported as such, never as not found.
Two Find sources runs, quoted as they came back
On 27 September 2026, "Great Vowel Shift" with the default sort, Best match, returned a total of 33,170 from OpenAlex. The first three results were Laurie Bauer's "The second Great Vowel Shift?" (1979), Bauer's "The Second Great Vowel Shift Revisited" (1992), and Roger Lass's "What, if anything, was the Great Vowel Shift?" (1992).
Sorted by Most cited, the same total came back, and the first result was Kenneth L. Miner's "Theoretical Implications Of The Great Menominee Vowel Shift" (1979, 84 citations), about Menominee, a Central Algonquian language, followed by Stockwell (1975, 50) and Bauer (1979, 44). The first 56 results, all on vowel shifts, came in citation order; after them came looser matches on vowels in general, not in that order, among them a 2008 paper on qualitative content analysis cited 22,986 times. Read titles before you save anything.
Two Cite a source runs, quoted as they came back
From Bauer's DOI, 10.1017/s0025100300001961, Cite a source returned, from Crossref, in APA 7:
Bauer, L. (1979). The second Great Vowel Shift? Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 9(2), 57–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100300001961
That entry stands. From Stockwell's DOI, 10.1075/ssls.1.16sto, it returned:
Stockwell, R. P. (1975). 10 problems in the interpretation of the Great English Vowel Shift. In Essays on the sound pattern of English (pp. 331–353). E. Story-Scientia. https://doi.org/10.1075/ssls.1.16sto
The name keeps its capitals, as APA sentence case asks. One thing still needs a human eye: the "10" is in Crossref's title, as is the absence of the book's editors; we could not open the publisher's page to confirm the title, so check the book's own title page before you use it. Checking an entry against its source is covered in how to check a reference is real.
Quick questions
What is the Great Vowel Shift in simple terms?
A change, mostly between about 1400 and 1700, that raised each long vowel of English a step and turned the highest two into diphthongs, so bite stopped sounding like beet.
Who discovered the Great Vowel Shift?
Otto Jespersen named it in 1909, but Karl Luick had described the connected changes in 1896, and the debate about how it worked began with both.
Why do meet and meat sound the same?
They once had different long e vowels, spelt ee and ea. The ea vowel later rose to join the ee vowel, and the spellings stayed apart.
Which EdCitation tool finds research on the Great Vowel Shift?
EdCitation's free Find sources, across some 300 million works; sort by Most cited and read the titles, since other languages' vowel shifts appear too.
References
- Bauer, L. (1979). The second Great Vowel Shift? Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 9(2), 57–66. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100300001961
- Glauser, B. (2017). The 'Great Vowel Shift' again: The evidence of the traditional Northern dialects [Conference abstract]. Methods in Dialectology XVI, National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. https://www2.ninjal.ac.jp/past-events/Methodsxvi/abs/Glauser.pdf
- Macafee, C., & Aitken, A. J. (2002). A history of Scots to 1700: Phonology. In A dictionary of the older Scottish tongue (Vol. 12, pp. xxix–clvii). Dictionaries of the Scots Language. https://dsl.ac.uk/about-scots/history-of-scots/phonology/
- Matthews, R. S. (1981). 'The second Great Vowel Shift?' ? Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 11(1), 22–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100300002188
- Menzer, M. J. (2000a). Chaucer's rhymes. The Great Vowel Shift. Furman University. http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/chaucer.htm
- Menzer, M. J. (2000b). English literature and the GVS. The Great Vowel Shift. Furman University. http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/lit.htm
- Menzer, M. J. (2000c). Later literature: Rhymes with "tea". The Great Vowel Shift. Furman University. http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/later.htm
- Menzer, M. J. (2000d). Shakespeare's puns. The Great Vowel Shift. Furman University. http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/shakespeare.htm
- Menzer, M. J. (2000e). What is the Great Vowel Shift? The Great Vowel Shift. Furman University. http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/what.htm
- Prichard, H. (2014). Northern dialect evidence for the chronology of the Great Vowel Shift. Journal of Linguistic Geography, 2(2), 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlg.2014.9
- Ringe, D. (n.d.). The Great English Vowel Shift [Course handout, Linguistics 310]. University of Pennsylvania. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kroch/courses/lx310/handouts/handouts-09/ringe/gvs-revised.pdf
- Stenbrenden, G. F. (2016). Long-vowel shifts in English, c. 1050–1700: Evidence from spelling. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107295469
- Stenbrenden, G. F. (2025). Phonological change. In J. C. Beal (Ed.), The new Cambridge history of the English language: Transmission, change and ideology (pp. 198–223). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009205870.010
- Weiner, E. (n.d.). Early modern English: Grammar, pronunciation, and spelling. Oxford English Dictionary. Archived September 28, 2024, at https://web.archive.org/web/20240928153836/https://www.oed.com/discover/early-modern-english-spelling-grammar-and-pronunciation/