One Step Now Education

April 10, 2026

peculiar

What's peculiar about the word peculiar? Well, for me, it was the base. I tried to think of other words it might be linked to (culinary? pecan?). After a quick run-through, this word made my list for further investigation.

This investigation takes us through several layers of structure and history. Watch for a suffix that appears for specific reasons and notice the role of a connecting vowel letter that does something unexpected with sound. We'll trace etymological relatives that reveal surprising connections across languages, and examine how syncope can trip up spellers. Keep your eye peeled. What seems "odd" at first often turns out to be common features of English orthography.

Meaning

What is this word's meaning and how does the word function?

If something is peculiar, we might say it's "odd" or "out of the ordinary." The Collins dictionary tells us something peculiar is "strange or unusual" or "belonging only to a particular thing, person, or situation."

I try to think of sentences for that last definition. Collins gives us:

• The problem is by no means peculiar to America.

For other sentences, I sometimes look at the Longman Dictionary, another good source for student-friendly definitions. Their entries include sentences from the Corpus, a collection of spoken and written English from sources like newspapers, television, and the Internet. A corpus helps us see how language is currently being used. For peculiar, Longman gives us:

• Glenn started acting peculiar after this wife's funeral.
• I've been having very peculiar dreams the past few weeks.
• This cheese has a peculiar smell.

A very popular vocabulary activity is to assign students to use their words in sentences. Raise your hand if you've given this assignment and had students return a sentence like:

• She is peculiar.
• My dog does peculiar things.

What makes her peculiar? What things does the dog do that are peculiar? These sentences are non-descriptive, and I cannot get a good idea of my students' understanding of the meanings of the words.

Sometimes I give my students sentence starters that make it more likely the sentence will end up demonstrating the meaning of the word.

• She acted more and more peculiar when...
• When he's being peculiar, my dog will...

The word peculiar functions adjectivally in these sentences. In the first sentence, peculiar is used to describe Glenn, dreams, and smell. In the second set, it modifies the noun things. It is also the subject complement for she. Adjectives can show up before the nouns they modify in addition to showing up as subject complements after a linking verb.

Structure

What are the elements that make up this word's structure?

I believe this word has a suffix that helps me understand that it is an adjective as well.

pecul + i + ar

The suffix <-ar> is an allomorph of the suffix <-al>. An allomorph is a form of an element that occurs in certain environments. In this case, <-ar> occurs after an lunar, cellular, and spectacular.

Linguists may refer to this as marked. The unmarked, or default, form would be <-al>. Markedness can refer to many things in linguistics; in general, it refers to an alteration from a basic form. We can say the word apples is marked for plurality, as it is an alteration of the basic form apple.

I'm thinking the is a connecting vowel letter. The default connecting vowel letter for Latin is . Therefore, when we see an

Let's check Etymonline about that base though. If it truly is doubling suffixing convention states that an element ending with a single vowel letter followed by a single consonant letter in a stressed syllable will double the final consonant prior to a vocalic, or vowel, suffix.

As we turn to the Etymonline entry for peculiar, I notice this word didn't join English until the Modern English period. The Modern English period began in the early 1500s shortly after the printing press and the Great Vowel Shift had begun shaping the English language. Many are surprised to find that Shakespeare is included during the Modern English period. English rose again as a literary tradition was being established with publications like Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. The Norman French had begun fading from the halls of government, although it left us with many words.

This word did come to us through Old French as peculiaire from Latin peculiaris, itself a derivative of peculium, "private property." Literally, property meant cattle, and if we continue to Follow the Froms in the Etymonline entry, we find pecu, "cattle."

pecule/ + i + ar

I use the slash bracket to denote that the Connecting vowel letters do not force the doubling convention, but they do replace

I do not have evidence for the unattested, we cannot use it as orthographic evidence that it was part of a separate element.

Relatives

What are the word's relatives and history?

A large base like that doesn't often leave room for a whole lot of morphological relatives. A morphological relative must include the same spelling of the base and an origin with the same root. For example, peculiarand peculiarity are morphological relatives. They both have the base pecu. We could add in peculiarly if you were so inclined to create a lexical matrix with this family.

Etymological relatives are related only by the root, their common origin. Their bases may differ. For instance, we have pecuniary, a word which means "concerning money." When we think about the value of cattle in English society in the 1500s, this definition makes sense. In English, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root gives us feoh, the word for fee. In French, we had a fief which led to fiefdoms. In Latin, we got words related to feuds. Feudalism was an organizing force in the society of the Middle Ages.

Studying our language is studying our history.

Graphemes

What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about the relationship of its graphemes and its phonology?

The first syllable of our word may be pronounced with a schwa. I can see a student misspelling it with an . A schwa is a reduced vowel. Vowel reduction works like a dimmer switch, turn it all the way up for a full vowel pronunciation, dim it down for schwa, and switch it off completely for silence. For instance, in the word family, we don't often pronounce the . It has been reduced beyond schwa into silence. We call this syncope. We see this with the second vegetable and the second chocolate.

I mentioned the was doing something interesting phonologically. Did you know an and happy and machine. They can both spell /aɪ/ as in cryand bike. They can also both spell /j/, as in yellow and peculiar. Or million. Or onion.

Next Steps

What concepts from this investigation can we explore next to learn more about the English orthographic system?

What a peculiar connection to cattle, eh? It's always amazing to me what a word investigation will reveal. We find connections between our agricultural and our economic histories as well as our language history. Each investigation is a trip back through time showing us that English orthography isn't random, but a record of where we've been.

Stay curious,

Brad

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PS. What was your biggest surprise in this investigation? The cattle connection? The dimmer switch for vowel reduction? Hit reply and tell me.

PPS. It is thought that we kept both the <-al> and <-ar> forms with familial and familiar, because they have developed distinct meanings. The word familiar came to us in the mid 14th century, but the word familial only is attested back to 1888 according to Etymonline.