'Ye Olde Shoppe' Was Always Pronounced 'The'

Old English had a letter for the 'th' sound. It looked like a lowercase b with a stem poked through both ways: Þ (uppercase) and þ (lowercase), called thorn, borrowed from the Elder Futhark rune Thurisaz. For roughly seven hundred years it sat next to the other letters in the alphabet doing its job — 'thorn' for the, that, this, thing.

The printing press killed it. Caxton set up shop in Westminster in 1476 with type cut on the continent. German and Italian foundries had no reason to cast a glyph for an English-only letter, so the cases of metal type that arrived in London were missing thorn entirely. English printers needed something close enough to drop in.

The closest sort in the case was y. In a few late medieval English hands, thorn had drifted into a shape that genuinely resembled a y — a stroke and a loop — so the substitution didn't look as wrong on the page as it should have. Printers typeset ye and meant the. Readers of the time still said 'the' out loud.

Thorn faded out by 1500. Centuries later, when antique-shop owners started painting Ye Olde on their signs to look quaint, they took the printer's hack at face value and pronounced it 'yee.' Iceland kept the letter. English kept the joke.