Lot-cloth split

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The lot-cloth split is the result of a late seventeenth-century sound change that lengthened {} to before voiceless fricatives. In some accents, the lengthened was raised, merging with the of words like thought. Words that entered the language later, or words that were used more in writing than speech, were often exempt from the lengthening, so that joss and Goth still have the short vowel. (Wells 1982: 136–37, 203–6, 234, 246–47)

As a result of the lengthening and raising, in the above-mentioned accents cross rhymes with sauce, and soft and cloth also have the vowel . Accents affected by this change include American English and, originally, RP, although today words of this group almost always have short in RP.

In American English the raising was extended to the environment before and in a few words to the environment before as well, giving pronunciations like for long, for chocolate, and for dog. Obviously, in accents of American English that are subject to the cot-caught merger, there is no difference between words that did and those that did not undergo the change.

The phoneme is one of the most irregular and skewed phoneme categories in English phonology. It was formed by the union of three highly conditioned processes: the vocalization of /l/ in talk, stalk, balk, all, etc. the monophthongization of aw in dawn, hawk, awful, bawd and awe, and the monophthongization of au and ou in caught, thought, caul, maul etc. The end result was a highly restricted phoneme, which occurred only before /t/ /d/ /k/ /l/, /n/, /f/ and finally in law, saw, etc. In North America, short o words began to migrate from the class by lexical diffusion into environments in which was not represented: before, which are /T/ in broth, moth, cloth, etc., before /s/ in loss, cost, etc.; before /N/ in long, strong, song, etc.; before /g/ in dog, log, frog, etc. The only environments for tensing were was already represented were before /f/ in off, often, coffin, etc., merging with in two words awful and cough and in a few words before /n/: on, gone. The end result was not the original skewed distribution that remained in British English, but a bewildering variety of dialect differences in the occurrence of . The ongoing cot-caught merger was probably triggered by this odd distribution.