Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy and this is our 85th episode.

Since the holiday season is upon us, I thought I'd talk about a holiday word, Christmas.

The C-H-R-I-S-T, part of the word Christmas, not surprisingly, came from the word Christ.

The word Christ came from Greek and means the Anointed One.

It is exactly the word Christmas's Greekness that causes it to be pronounced with a K sound

instead of the usual C-H sound of English pronunciation.

It turns out this K-sound pronunciation is widespread among words spelled C-H that originated in Greek.

Here are just some of them.

Chaos, character, chrome, chorus, choreography, chronic, chronological, synchronize, charisma, charisma, charismatic,

archaic, and archaeology. The word alchemy seems to be particularly resilient to pronunciation changes

when it gets adopted by a new language.

It came to us, according to the online etymology dictionary,

from a long line of languages.

We're using it in modern English directly from Middle English.

Middle English got it from Old French, who borrowed it from medieval Latin, who adopted it from Arabic.

Where'd Arabic get it from? The Greeks.

All that time it seems to have kept the K sound for its pronunciation.

The word alchemy does not have a major role in the vocabulary of many of us.

However, derivations of that word include chemical, chemistry, and chemotherapy.

All of those words also kept the CH spelling and the K-sound pronunciation.

The K-sound, however, is not the only other C-H pronunciation.

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