There are people who stigmatise the use of ‘to ax’ as a variant of ‘to ask’.

There are people who stigmatise the use of ‘to ax’ as a variant of ‘to ask’.

However, ‘to ax’ is at least 1200 years old. It stems from Old English ‘ācsian’ with /ks/, a very frequent variant of ‘āscian’ with /sk/. Later, writers such as Chaucer used both ‘axen’ and ‘asken’.

Swapping two sounds, as happened with /sk/ > /ks/, is called metathesis.

My infographic shows more examples of metathesis in English and some of its Germanic sister languages. Dutch is the absolute queen of metathesis.