Ghoti

Ghoti (pop: 20,204) is a small town on  the Mumbai-Nashik highway NH3 about 2 hours away from Mumbai.


The name has another history though: The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word ‘fish’ could legitimately be spelled ‘ghoti,’ by using the ‘gh’ sound from ‘enough,’ the ‘o’ sound from ‘women’ and the ‘ti’ sound from ‘action.’Just one problem with the well-worn anecdote: there’s not a shred of evidence that Shaw, though a noted advocate for spelling reform, ever brought up ghoti. Scholars have searched high and low through Shaw’s writings and have never found him suggesting ghoti as a comical respelling of fish. The true origins of ghoti go back to 1855, before Shaw was even born. In December of that year, the publisher Charles Ollier sent a letter to his good friend Leigh Hunt, a noted poet and literary critic. "My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling ‘Fish,’" Ollier wrote. You guessed it: good old ghoti.
NYT