As if the world wasn’t scary enough right now, Halloween is coming up. There’s cutesie spooking and then there is the real deal. The conjuring. The spirits. The magic. When the gossamer veil between this world and the other – the others – thin as anything, withdraws…Macbeth, and all that. I mean “the Scottish play”!
Ah, Halloween, Halloween…or should that be Hallowe’en? What’s the apostrophe doing there? And what about the most iconic paraphernalia of October, jack-o’-lanterns? Here’s your ultimate Halloween-punctuation-guide you never knew you needed!
Halloween Apostrophe Rule 1: Possession
Halloween comes from All Hallows Day (which we now call All Saints Day, hallows being an Old English word for “holy” – Harry Potter anybody?). All Hallows Day is on 1 November, the day that we remember and celebrate all the saints and holy people, known and unknown. (Just to make things more complicated for you: there’s also All Souls Day on 2 November to remember the dearly departed, saintly or not.)
Here we go already, one apostrophe rule kicks in, namely signalling possession. The Oxford English Dictionary and plenty of official language overseers write All Saints’ Day, or All Hallows’ Day with an apostrophe, the day of all the hallows/saints. I would argue, though, that the possession here is moot: is the day really owned by the saints? Or is it more a case of the noun happening to be plural? Compare Fathers Day or Girls School.
Halloween Apostrophe Rule 2: Contraction
What about that Halloween spelling now? All Hallows was on 1 November, so the evening before that would be called All Hallows Evening, or Even, which, when pronounced fast as people tend to do, sounds like /een/, or /ee-un/. This is not official phonological spelling, just an attempt at transcribing what it sounds like. There may be a little lingering over and lengthening of the ee. People in the past swallowed the v of “even” and showed this by marking the disappeared letter with a little hook between the e-twins. That’s apostrophe rule number 2, contraction: when one or more letters vanish, we flag that up through an apostrophe. That’s a super common occurrence in English and other languages. Just look at “that’s” which is a contraction of “that is”.
So, people shortened the term All Hallows Even, not only at the end, but at the beginning too. “All” fell away, and we’re left with Halloween. The apostrophe spelling Hallowe’en is still relatively common in the UK, and was probably original (that is, the apostrophe didn’t creep in later, but was there early on, and later fell out).
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Around the sixteenth century, people started to say Hallowe’en rather than Hallow Even. And around the late eighteenth century, Halloween without apostrophe appeared. Apparently, there’s even evidence for people writing Hallow-e’en, knitting together the two words with a hyphen, because the plural -s of Hallows fell away, together with the possessive apostrophe attached to the -s. What a crowd of little punctuation marks! I’d love it if it didn’t look a bit…busy on the page. We have here a case of punctuation archeology: punctuation as a relic of the permutations a word goes through across the centuries, only that, sometimes, those relics are not useful anymore, our eyes have grown used to the word without reminders of what’s fallen away, and we can discard the dots and dashes. As we duly do. There’s only one way of spelling Halloween, and it’s HALLOWEEN! You can cite me.
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More Halloweenie Punctuation! The Horrible Hyphen…
Onto our second Halloween punctuation treat: originally, All Hallows Day was in spring, but in the nineth century, Pope Gregory IV moved it to 1 November. Happily, this fell together with Samhain, the Celtic festival of the dead when the doors between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead were believed to become porous, so that the souls of our loved ones could come visit. That’s why we dress up in scary costumes, tell ghost stories, and put up lights and lanterns. At the end of the Middle Ages, a custom emerged that had people go from door to door, asking for cakes in exchange for prayers for the departed. Early trick or treating!
People’s favourite Halloween custom is, of course, hollowing out a pumpkin, carving a scary face into the skin, and illuminating it with a candle. That, too, is a Renaissance tradition remembering Stingy Jack of Irish folklore who tricked the devil into paying his every drink. After Stingy Jack’s death, the devil cursed him to roam the cold dark night for ever with nothing but a glowing piece of coal to find the way through the foggy deep. Jack put his coal in a carved-out turnip, and a jack-o’-lantern was born. The apostrophe contracts the -f of “of” here, and the hyphen-chain binds the plethora of little words together, making it crystal clear they belong together as one.
Alternatively, those hollowed-out-lit-up vegetables are known as will-o’-the-wisp (an extra hyphen, yay!). It’s a similar story, but this time it’s fairies who lure travellers into the marshes at night with their flickering lights made from wisps, or bundles of burning straw. Those lights do actually appear in moors, and are gases from decaying plants that start to glow. At some point, someone invented a guy called Will who tempted travellers into the marshes with his wisp torches, hence, Will of the wisps, or will-o’-the-whisps.
And now, off to some spooky playing with this Very Scary dog-reaper who knocked at my door, asking for doggo treats, or else…!