English spelling is a jungle, full of wonders – and perils. Sometimes the peril is a lurking ocelot wanting to prey on you. Sometimes it is just that the lush meandering vine-knitted pathways of the written form have been maintained by tradition between eroded edifices of ancient orthography while the limestone bedrock beneath has been eroded by the gradual currents of usage and in places has collapsed and re-formed altogether, so that at one moment you are walking blithely in the bushes and the next you are plunged through the darkness into the deep obscure pool of a cenote. And you will have had no sense of the onset of that cavity; it was there before your time and has been waiting for you, and you will make the error only oncet.
Onced.
Onct.
Wunst.
What the heck.
OK, look, here’s the deal. A long time ago, in Old English, when the word for ‘one’ was ān, the instrumental form of it was ǣne, which was used adverbially, and the genitive -s was later added to this form to make enes, similarly to how we got besides and anyways and towards. Meanwhile, the form oon (based on a pronunciation shift from ān) had come into use for the number (while an stayed on as the indefinite article); to go with that, enes became ones, which subsequently was written as once following a trend of spelling the final [s] as ce, as in hence, pence, and mice.
But in the meantime the pronunciation of the vowels was shifting, and long vowels became diphthongs. And while in some other derivatives of one the diphthong became [ow], as in alone, atone, and only, the original word one and once both went with a variation from the south and west of England, which is how we say it now – and not at all how our forebears said it once.
But there’s one more thing: a tendency in some varieties of English and some contexts to add a [t] after a final [s], as in amidst and against. In the case of once, that variation didn’t become standard, but it became common enough that it gets written down from time to time.
But it’s not so common that there’s any spelling of it that doesn’t look wrong. Usual habits are so ensconced that our expectations of what spelling spells are likely to prevail at first glance. We accept once and one because we’re used to them, but most of us are not used to the t-ful version, especially not in print. So our foot hovers above a void that we do not know how to avoid.
And if you try to bypass the cenote, you’ll get chased by an ocelot that’s just waiting for a hapless misstep: you have to know all the strange side paths of spelling or you will be attacked. You see, if you want to show that someone is uneducated, you can use what’s called “eye dialect” and write them down as saying wun and wunce to indicate that they don’t know good English, even though (a) these spellings sound the same and (b) the “bad” spellings are more sensible than the “good” spellings. But when you have that added [t] at the end, wunst is just a step too far for many people; it looks like it wandered over from German, and it also looks almost unduly uneducated.
But the alternatives are mostly worse. Oncet, the most economical approach, thrashes like a bird of paradise caught in hanging vines, and onct is like the same bird but missing a wing – there’s no way it will fly. Oncst is that bird now being eaten by a snake. Onced may look like it’s pronounced [wənst], but the thing that helps the pronunciation – the productiveness of -ed as a suffix in many contexts – obstructs comprehension: it looks like a past tense form rather than like just once with a spare t. Onest seems not quite honest. Oncest seems vaguely indecent and also vaguely pleonastic, and in any case it appears to have two syllables.
Perhaps one’st would pass, but only perhaps. The best bet may – may – be once’t: for once, an apostrophe actually helps make something easier to read rather than just being another orthographic ocelot. The only problem is that some readers may infer that something has been contracted, such as it. (You do not want to contract it unexpectedly in the jungle of orthography!) Blessings accrue to those speakers in some areas who say this word yinst, as they have it nailed down, but that’s off in the dense underbrush for the rest of us. We’d prefer to stick to the trail and hope we can sidestep the cenote this time.
The worst thing of all this, though, is that you can’t even represent one using a numeral. As perfect as 1st would be, it has been taken by first, which is formed not from the number at all but from the same root as gives us fore (which also gives us forth, which forever confounds with fourth – such a mischievous root). Perhaps the best solution is to have your characters do things not oncet but twicet (or twice twicet, but that would be forced).
Sesquiotica 