The word grievous was apparently pronounced as /grivißs/ by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery. Besides the case here in 1 Nephi 17:25, we have nine other places in the text where /grivißs/ is found:
Every occurrence of /grivißs/ in the manuscripts has a spelling with an extra vowel (either i, e, ee, or ei ). Counting each manuscript occurrence of this word individually, we get the following statistics for the various spellings:
| 𝓞 | 𝓟 | |
| grievious | 2 | 6 |
| grieveous | 2 | 2 |
| grieveeous | 0 | 1 |
| grieveious | 0 | 1 |
Only four occurrences are extant in the original manuscript.
One could argue that the manuscript spelling grieveous stands for the word grievous and its standard pronunciation /grivßs/. Oliver Cowdery produced this spelling four times in the manuscripts: in 𝓞 and 𝓟 for 1 Nephi 17:25, in 𝓞 for Alma 39:3, and in 𝓟 for Moroni 9:1. In support of this interpretation of the spelling grieveous, one could refer to the spelling grieveious that occurs in 𝓟 for 2 Nephi 19:1. Although this particular spelling clearly represents the pronunciation /grivißs/, the spelling should probably be analyzed as grieve +i+ ous, with the result that grieve, with its final silent e, stands for /griv/. Consequently, grieveous could be interpreted as grieve +ous, thus implying the pronunciation /grivßs/.
On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that Oliver Cowdery intended grieveous to stand for the pronunciation /grivißs/. Note first that in Alma 39:3, Oliver wrote grieveous in 𝓞, but when he copied the word from 𝓞 into 𝓟, he respelled this word as grievious. This respelling implies that he interpreted his earlier grieveous as standing for /grivißs/. In addition, Oliver once misspelled the word lasciviousness as lasiveousness (in 𝓟 for Alma 16:18), thus showing that he sometimes spelled /vißs/ at the end of a word as -veous. Nor is the spelling -eous for /ißs/ impossible since it is found in fairly common words such as courteous, hideous, and miscellaneous. Finally, we should note that except for the four instances of the spelling grieveous in the manuscripts, all the other manuscript spellings of /grivißs/ directly support the nonstandard pronunciation /grivißs/. Consequently, the most reasonable assumption is that the four manuscript instances of the spelling grieveous also represent the pronunciation /grivißs/.
For convenience’ sake, the critical text will consistently use the spelling grievious (the most frequent spelling in the manuscripts) to stand for the pronunciation /grivißs/. This spelling grievious will be used in the ten different passages where the current text reads grievous. In other words, the spelling grievious will serve as the “standard spelling” for the nonstandard pronunciation /grivißs/.
It is possible that Joseph Smith actually saw grievous as the text was revealed to him and that for each passage he read off grievous as grievious (just as many today read off mischievous as if it were written mischievious). Despite this possibility, it is worth noting that there is no manuscript evidence of any tendency to correct grievious to grievous. The critical text does not presume that the original text was in standard English, which means that nonstandard dialectal forms are accepted providing they are supported by the earliest textual evidence (as they are here for each case of grievious).
The 1830 typesetter replaced every case of the dialectal grievious with the standard grievous. Nonetheless, there has been some tendency for typesetters of subsequent editions to reintroduce the dialectal grievious. For instance, the spelling grevious (a variant of grievious) has shown up quite a few times (three times in the 1902 LDS edition and once in each of the following editions: 1841, 1849, 1879, and 1905). The manuscript spelling grievious also shows up once (in the 1837 edition). The Oxford English Dictionary (online version, 21 January 2004) lists not only three historical occurrences of the spelling grievious but also four of grevious.
The nonstandard pronunciation /grivißs/ has been fairly common in the history of the English language and appears to be due to the influence of similar words ending in /ivißs/ (such as previous, devious, and especially the nonstandard but very common mischievious). For another example of a Book of Mormon word with an extra /i/ vowel before the adjective ending -ous, see the word tremendious (discussed under Alma 28:2–3); this nonstandard form of tremendous was variously spelled in the manuscripts as tremendious, tremendeeous, and tremendeeos.
Summary: Accept the nonstandard grievious in lieu of the standard grievous throughout the critical text; all the manuscript spellings indicate that the word was systematically pronounced with an extra /i/ after the /v/.