The rise and fall and rise of the digraph 〈oa〉 in English

The present paper examines the history of the digraph 〈oa〉 in English: it is relatively rare in OE and early ME, falls out of use in late ME, and reappears in the late fifteenth century. Different lexemes have been spelt with 〈oa〉 in the different language periods, but in the majority of cases, the vowel so represented is the reflex of early ME /ɔ:/ or OE o in an open syllable; hence, the digraph is clearly phonetically conditioned. The paper also investigates the graphotactic constraints on the orthographic variants 〈oa〉, 〈oCe〉, 〈oe〉.