Ditch is native, from Old English dic, and its spelling shows a purely English convention. The -tch used to write the sound after a short vowel — ditch, watch, fetch, catch — has no counterpart in French, Latin or Greek. English scribes worked it out for English sounds, which makes it, along with -dge, a reasonably reliable sign that a word is either native or has been fully naturalised.
The word is a doublet of dike, and the pair record a genuine ambiguity rather than a mistake. Dig a trench and you necessarily produce two things: a hollow and, beside it, a heap of the earth you took out. Old English dic covered the excavation; Middle English applied the related word to the bank as well. As one Victorian etymologist put it, the ditch and the bank are made by the same act, so it is unsurprising that one name covered both.
ditch (n.) "a trench made by digging," especially a trench for draining wet land," Middle English diche , from Old English dic "ditch, dike," a variant of dike (q.v.), which at first meant "an excavation," but later in Middle English was applied to the ridge or bank of earth thrown up in excavating. Middle English diche also could mean "a defensive wall." As the earth dug out of the ground in making a trench is heaped up on the side, the ditch and the bank are constructed by the same act, and it is not surprising that the two should have been confounded under a common name. [Hensleigh Wedgwood, "A Dictionary of English Etymology," 1859] Ditch-water "stale or stagnant water that collects in ditches" is from mid-14c. In Middle English, digne as dich water (late 14c.) meant "foolishly proud." Also see last-ditch . ditch (v.) late 14c., "surround with a ditch; dig a ditch or ditches in;" from ditch (n.). Meaning "to throw into a ditch" is from 1816, later especially "to throw a train off the tracks," hence the slang sense of "abandon, discard (as if throwing into a ditch)," first recorded 1899 in American English, and in reference to aircraft "to bring down into the sea," by 1941. The last might have been from or reinforced by the use of the ditch in naval slang for "the sea" (1922). Related: Ditched ; ditching . also from late 14c.
ditch came in through Old English, and its spelling follows that family's conventions.
How that family writes these sounds
| /tʃ/ after a short vowel | -tchwatch, fetch, ditch |
What gives it away on the page
| -dge, -tch | English-only spellings for /dʒ/ and /tʃ/ after a short vowel.edge, bridge, ditch, fetch |
Old English in the spelling guide · guess another word's family