Telephone and appointments

The seventeenth entry is soletrar, and it is worth a stop, because the English word that answers it is three words wearing one coat. « To spell », naming the letters one by one, is the only sense soletrar covers, and on a bad line it is the most useful verb on the page: Soletra-me o nome da rua? The second « spell » is the charm, and it has nothing to do with letters. It descends from Old English spell, a story or a saying, the same word that sits inside « gospel », from gōdspell, good news. Portuguese puts that meaning in o feitiço, from the Latin facticius, made by art — the very word English later borrowed back as « fetish ». The third « spell » is a stretch of time, a spell of fine weather or a spell in hospital, and it comes from a third root, Old English spelian, to stand in for somebody, so a spell was first a turn at work. There Portuguese says um período or uma temporada. Three histories, one sound, and only the first of them will get a street name across a crackling line.