It started, like many things in my classroom, with a question.
We were knee-deep in a pronunciation activity. One of those rhythm-and-flow sessions where we start thinking the word attitude has one or two possible pronunciations and end up with about five. Then a hand went up, mid-sentence, eyes squinting like she’d just seen something suspicious out of the corner of a word. “Why do we pronounce the last e in sesame?”
A pause. A flicker of curiosity. Another student looked up like wait, yeah, why DO we?
At this point they know that English loves to ignore the last “e.” We toss it in for spelling but leave it silent, like an understudy who never gets called on stage. Hope. Cake. Name. All of them end with an invisible whisper. But sesame? That one proudly says "Don’t forget about me." All three syllables, clear as day: /ˈs ɛsəmi/.
So… why?
The answer, it turns out, is a little like trying to explain why your cousin who just moved to the U.S. last year speaks with a slightly cooler accent. It’s all about when the word entered the family.
Sesame came into English through a long, winding route: from Greek (sēsamon) to Latin (sesamum), then Old French (sésame), and finally into Middle English.
But timing is everything.
Words borrowed earlier from Greek (like school or drama) had time to get comfy in English’s phonological house. They settled in, dropped their bags, lost a few vowels along the way.
But sesame came later. Too late to get that makeover. By the time it arrived, English had stopped being quite so aggressive about trimming foreign words down. So it kept its full three-syllable form, including that final /i/ sound.
It’s a member of what I like to call the Too-Late Club: words that arrived after English stopped roughing up its guests.
Once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. You start spotting other late arrivals who also get to keep their final “e” pronounced:
recipe
apostrophe
catastrophe
These words aren’t just exceptions. They’re clues. Little breadcrumbs showing the path language took to get here.
One of the best parts of this job is getting to watching a “wait, what?” turn into a slow, satisfied “wait… that kinda makes sense.” That moment when the language stops feeling like a pile of contradictions and starts revealing itself as a system. A chaotic one, sure, with questionable taste in spelling. But a system nonetheless.
And for me, that’s a reminder: every weird quirk in English is usually hiding a story. A trade route. A war. A printing press. A Greek root that took the long way around.
So the next time you say sesame, take a second to appreciate that final “e.” It’s not just a letter. It’s a time capsule.
