The Washington Times was opining about the US managing to finally get out of Iraq, back in 2006, when it printed “That’s why we should have used some bellweather event like the signing of the Iraqi constitution, or the parliamentary elections as our moment to declare victory and exit stage left.” Whenever US national elections are approaching, you’ll see mentions like “the bellwhether state of Ohio.” And if you read the financial pages, it’s pretty common to see mentions of “bellwether stocks” and “bellwether companies.”
Some of those are just mistakes — it’s “bellwether”, not “-whether” or “-weather” — and historically speaking, those mistakes have started occurring only recently. That’s because far more people used to live on farms, have contact with farms and farm animals, or at least have visited something agricultural, like a crop or a herd of farm animals. That gave them some background knowledge, because “bellwether” — which means anything that’s out in front of a trend and indicates the likely direction of something like foreign policy, or an election, or the stock market — comes from goats.
A “wether” used to mean the ram that was the leader of a flock of goats. Where the wether led, the rest of the flock would follow. The wether wore a bell around its neck so the farmer could more easily find the flock. The term goes back at least to the 1400s, and comes from similar words in Germanic languages like Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and the like. But before that it might have originated in the Latin word “vitulus,” which means calf. After all, goats were not the only herd animals that were more easily found when wearing bells.
The word “wether”, at least as a standalone term, began to fade out around the late 1800s, and eventually its only remaining usage was in “bellwether.” But then people began to look at “bellwether” — itself a relatively uncommon word, but one you’d roll out occasionally — and they’d think “hang on, “wether” can’t be right; I don’t think that’s even a word.” But they knew how it was supposed to sound, so both “weather” and “whether” began to be substituted. Neither one made any sense, of course, but if you don’t know that “wether” is a real word, then “bellwether” doesn’t make any sense to you either.
By the way, it appears that “bellweather” was the earlier mistake, making it the bellwether for the misspelling of “bellwether.” I guess you could at least imagine some kind of bell that got rung as a warning about whether bad weather was on the way. Although wouldn’t that be a “weatherbell,” not the other way around?
