The military word colonel is spelled with an “l” instead of an “r,” but pronounced as if it had an “r.”

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The word originated because the person who merited this title lead a column of soldiers:  column, colonel.

But we speakers of languages descended from Latin often tend to drop, or change, a sound in a word if it occurs more than once, as does the “l” in this word. This process is called dissimilation, essentially getting rid of the similar parts.

Another example of a word this has happened to is governor.

Governor is still spelled with two “r”s, but many people pronounce it as if the first “r” didn’t exist; govenor.

In the mid-1500s colonel appeared in English and at that point seemed to be spelled as it was pronounced, coronel with an “r.”  Which is to say that in French at the time the “l” had been replaced with an “r” and English adopted that form and spelling.

Over the next 100 years colonel slowly readopted a spelling that included the first “l” and reflected a more accurate etymology to do with columns.

For a while some people had looked at the spelling of the word with an “r” and thought instead that its etymology was in relation to corona or a “crown.” This would have made sense to them since the military colonels were fighting on behalf of their royal leaders.

Dictionary researchers actually went through dozens of documents written over the century surrounding Shakespeare’s lifetime and documented the diminishing colonel word-count using the “r” spelling against the rise of the “l” usage.

The column of soldiers that a colonel leads is so called because they march in a straight formation. The formation must have been reminiscent of a tall column as might hold up the roofs of Greek and Roman buildings.

Those columns in turn were named based on their height from an older Indo-European word kel meaning “hill” or “high place.”