"is the French pronoun moy, now moi, which currently we pronounce as a single syllable: [mwa]."(24) Ingeniously, Pearson notes that Maria in F1 talks not of gulling Malvolio into "an ayword" (Oxford ed., 2.3.126) but into "an ayword." The former reading is more usual, as ayword appears neither elsewhere in Shakespeare nor in the OED.(25) Pearson's reading allows him to argue that Maria "gulls him with a first-person pronoun - moai = moe = moy = I myself."(26) Not only is Pearson's suggestion weakened by the absence of ayword from any other source but it is undermined by an alternative meaning of the prefix when it does appear.
28 Another possibility arises from the fact that "an ayword" on stage would sound like "an eye-word" as demonstrated by the quibbling at "Ay, an you had any eye behind you....