In my historical researches lately I’ve been noticing how fluid the the street names were, with some streets having multiple spellings (Dickson/Dixon) and some street names morphing over time. Robert How, an investor in the Scottish Australian Mining Company had a street named after him, but the street name somehow acquired a trailing “e” to become “Howe Street”.

The mystery of the extra “e” was solved when I noticed that “Wye Street” was originally called “Wyee Street”. It seems that shifty “e” just wandered in from the neighbouring street and took up residence! If not for the peripatetic positioning of that vagrant vowel the street sign would look like this …