Ye olde

thumb|300px|right|Anachronistic sign reading "Ye Olde Pizza Parlor"

thumb| The [[Philadelphia Mint#First building (1792–1833)|first Philadelphia Mint, as it appeared around 1908]]

Ye olde is a pseudo-Early Modern English phrase originally used to suggest a connection between a place or business and Merry England (or the medieval period). The term dates to 1896 or earlier; it continues to be used today, albeit now more frequently in an ironically anachronistic and kitsch fashion. With the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of for became ubiquitous, leading to the common ye as in "Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe". One major reason for this was that existed in the blackletter types that William Caxton and his contemporaries imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while did not, resulting in 10px|class=skin-invert (yͤ) as well as y^e. The connection became less obvious after the letter thorn was discontinued in favour of the digraph . Today, ye is often incorrectly pronounced as the archaic pronoun of the same spelling.