No matter which way you look at it, albeit is a strange word. Whenever I used to come across it in a book or an article, I never quite knew how to pronounce it in my head. Rather than “all-be-it”, it was more like “all-biet”, and I mumbled it to myself in a French accent kind of way.

I could have looked it up or asked someone, but after a few seconds I had moved on and didn’t think of albeit until the next time the word appeared, which wasn’t very often. This however gone on for nearly 4 decades now.

I just presumed it was one of those words that has various pronouncians, and perhaps it was one of those mysterious words that nobody truly knew how it was meant to be said. Once upon a time, a monk wrote a typo, nobody bothered to correct him, and scholars forever since have just done the same as I have.

However, one day I was watching something subtitled, I can’t remember what it was, but the person speaking said albeit, and i read the subtitle at the same time and it blew my mind. 

So after all this time, I now know that albeit is just a lazy way of writing all be it. I have mixed feelings of whoever it was that came up with the word. On the one hand they are very lazy, but on the other they invented the phone abbreviation before phones were even thought of.