Ask is native, old, and has been fighting about its own pronunciation for a thousand years. Old English had ascian, and earlier ahsian, from a Germanic root meaning to wish or desire. The order of that s and k has never been stable: Old English also had acsian, and the modern dialect form ax is not a corruption of anything but a direct descendant of it — respectable enough that Tyndale used it in his 1526 translation of Luke, and an accepted literary variant until about 1600.
The spelling we ended up with is partly an accident of contact. Left to itself, Old English ascian would have come through normal sound changes as ash or esh, and those forms did survive in the Midlands and the southwest. The form that won was shaped by a Scandinavian cousin of the word, one of the countless small Norse interventions in English that are invisible unless you know what the native outcome would have been.
ask
(v.)
Middle English
asken
, from Old English
ascian
"ask, call for an answer; make a request," earlier
ahsian
, from Proto-Germanic
*aiskojanan
, which is reconstructed (Watkins) to be from PIE
*ais-
"to wish, desire" (source also of Sanskrit
icchati
"seeks, desires," Armenian
aic
"investigation," Old Church Slavonic
iskati
"to seek," Lithuanian
ieškau, ieškoti
"to seek").
The form in English was influenced by a Scandinavian cognate (such as Danish
æske
); the Old English would have evolved by normal sound changes into
ash
,
esh
, which was a Midlands and southwestern England dialect form. Modern dialectal
ax
is as old as Old English
acsian
and was an accepted literary variant until c. 1600 ("[Jesus] answered and sayed unto them : I also will axe you a question." Luke xx, Tyndale, 1526). Related:
Asked
;
asking
.
Other Germanic cognates include Old Saxon
escon
, Old Frisian
askia
"request, demand, ask," Middle Dutch
eiscen
, Dutch
eisen
"to ask, demand," Old High German
eiscon
"to ask (a question)," German
heischen
"to ask, demand."
Old English also had
fregnan
/
frignan
which carried more directly the sense of "question, inquire," and is from PIE root
*prek-
, the common source of words for "ask" in most Indo-European languages (see
pray
).
If you ask me
"in my opinion" is attested from 1910.
ask came in through Old English, and its spelling follows that family's conventions.
On the register ladder
English kept all three words for this idea, one from each layer, and the rung is itself the cue: the native word is blunt and concrete, the French one polite, the Latin one formal or technical.
| Old English | French | Latin |
|---|---|---|
| ask | question | interrogate |
Old English in the spelling guide · guess another word's family