Wound
Wound , imperfect and past participle
Wound (?; 277) , noun
[Old English wounde, wunde, Anglo-Saxon wund; akin to OFries. wunde, Old Saxon wunda, Dutch wonde, Old High German wunta, German wunde, Icelandic und, and to Anglo-Saxon, Old Saxon, & German wund sore, wounded, Old High German wunt, Gothic wunds, and perhaps also to Gothic winnan to suffer, English win. r140. Compare Zounds.]
Walker condemns the pronunciation woond as a “capricious novelty.” It is certainly opposed to an important principle of our language, namely, that the Old English long sound written ou, and pronounced like French ou or modern English oo, has regularly changed, when accented, into the diphthongal sound usually written with the same letters ou in modern English, as in ground, hound, round, sound. The use of ou in Old English to represent the sound of modern English oo was borrowed from the French, and replaced the older and Anglo-Saxon spelling with u. It makes no difference whether the word was taken from the French or not, provided it is old enough in English to have suffered this change to what is now the common sound of ou; but words taken from the French at a later time, or influenced by French, may have the French sound.
Collocations (1)
Wound , transitive verb
[Anglo-Saxon wundian. r140. See Wound, n.]