become identical to and so Middle English and have become in standard Modern English, and meat and meet are now homophones. The merger did not affect the words in which had undergone shortening (see section above), and a handful of other words (such as break, steak, great) also escaped the merger in the standard accents and so acquired the same vowel as brake, stake, grate. Hence, the words meat, threat (which was shortened), and great now have three different vowels although all three words once rhymed. The merger results in the lexical set, as defined by John Wells. Words in the set that had ENE (Middle English ) are mostly spelled (meet, green, etc.), with a single in monosyllables (be, me) or followed by a single consonant and a vowel letter (these, Peter), sometimes or (believe, ceiling), or irregularly (key, people). Most of those that had ENE (Middle English ) are spelled (meat, team, eat, etc.), but some borrowed words have a single (legal, decent, complete), , or otherwise (receive, seize, phoenix, quay). There are also some loanwords in which is spelled (police, machine, ski), most of which entered the language later. There are still some dialects in the British Isles that do not have the merger. Some speakers in Northern England have or in the first group of words (those that had ENE , like meet), but in the second group (those that had ENE , like meat). In Staffordshire, the distinction might rather be between in the first group and in the second group. In some (particularly rural) varieties of Irish English, the first group has , and the second preserves . A similar contrast has been reported in parts of Southern and Western England, but it is now rarely encountered there. In some Yorkshire dialects, an additional distinction may be preserved within the meat set. Words that originally had long vowels, such as team and cream (which come from Old English tēam and Old French creme), may have , and those that had an original short vowel, which underwent open syllable lengthening in Middle English (see previous section), like eat and meat (from Old English etan and mete), have a sound resembling , similar to the sound that is heard in some dialects in words like eight and weight that lost a velar fricative). In Alexander's book (2001) about the traditional Sheffield dialect, the spelling "eigh" is