# Why do we spell "eureka", not "heureka"? Tags: etymology, orthography, greek, aspiration - Score: 9 - Views: 4841 - Answers: 3 - Answered: yes - Asked by: Igor Urazowski (331 rep) - Asked: 2011-12-14 - Edited: 2012-01-11 - Site: english ## Question Why is the spelling "eureka" by far more preferable to "heureka" in English? Greek vocabularies give "heureka" for the perfect to "heurisko". ## Answers ### Answer by Cerberus - Reinstate Monica (score: 9) In summary, my hypothesis is that certain translators transliterated the Greek letters but not the accents, and thereby lost the [h], because initial [h] is only a small mark above the vowel. They may have done so because their Greek was not very good, or because they did not consider the [h] mark a real letter worth transliterating. The Greek word εὕρηκα was pronounced [hěu̯rɛːka] in classical Greek; the [h] is indicated by the spiritus asper ("rough breathing"), the tiny "c" above the ὑ. (The other accent, the acutus, indicates increasing pitch; note that the spiritus asper came from a tiny left half of the Greek letter H, which was used in some older dialects to denote an [h] sound.) Many, perhaps most Greek words came to