“This word for 'after death' contains a spelling error that is over a thousand years old—and nobody has ever corrected it.”
Latin postumus was the superlative of posterus (coming after) and meant simply 'last'—the last child born, the last in a series. It had nothing to do with death. A postumus child was the youngest, the final one. The word's original 'h'-less spelling reflected its true etymology: post (after) + a superlative suffix.
The error crept in during the medieval period. Scribes noticed that postumus sounded like it could contain humus (earth, ground) or humare (to bury). Since the word was often applied to children born after their father's death, the false connection to burial seemed logical. By the 7th century, the spelling posthumus had become standard, and the ghost 'h' has haunted the word ever since.
English borrowed posthumous in the early 1600s, complete with its false etymology. Shakespeare's play Cymbeline (1610) features a character named Posthumus Leonatus—born after his father's death. The misspelling was so established by then that no scholar challenged it.
The word now means exclusively 'occurring after death'—a posthumous award, a posthumous publication. The original Latin meaning of 'last-born' is completely extinct. A thousand-year-old spelling error rewrote the word's meaning, and the rewrite stuck.
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Today
Posthumous is a word built on a lie that became true. The 'h' is a medieval forgery, a scribal error that rewrote the word's DNA. But the error was so convincing, and the new meaning so useful, that nobody wanted to fix it. Sometimes a mistake is more useful than the truth.
Every posthumous honor carries this irony: the word itself was transformed by a misunderstanding that no one alive could correct, because the people who made the error were already dead.
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