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An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
The English Pronouncing Dictionary (EPD) was created by the British phonetician Daniel Jones and was first published in 1917. [1] It originally comprised over 50,000 headwords listed in their spelling form, each of which was given one or more pronunciations transcribed using a set of phonemic symbols based on a standard accent.
Homographs are words with the same spelling but having more than one meaning. Homographs may be pronounced the same , or they may be pronounced differently (heteronyms, also known as heterophones). Some homographs are nouns or adjectives when the accent is on the first syllable, and verbs when it is on the second.
A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, also referred to as Kenyon and Knott, was first published by the G. & C. Merriam Company in 1944, and written by John Samuel Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott. It provides a phonemic transcription of General American pronunciations of words, using symbols largely corresponding to those of the IPA .
For example, you may pronounce cot and caught, do and dew, or marry and merry the same. This often happens because of dialect variation (see our articles English phonology and International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects). If this is the case, you will pronounce those symbols the same for other words as well. [1]
A word like immediately, for example, is variously pronounced by Americans as: ihMEEdeeuhtlee; uhMEEdeeuhtlee; eeMEEdeeuhtlee; The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary suggests the first pronunciation. Similarly, this pronunciation markup guide will choose the most widely used form. NOTE: This guide is designed to be simple and easy to use.
Webster hoped to standardize American speech, since Americans in different parts of the United States used somewhat different vocabularies and spelled, pronounced, and used words differently. In 1825, while spending a year abroad at the University of Cambridge and then in Paris, Webster completed this dictionary, which featured 70,000 words ...
The phrases "decisive battle" and "decisive victory" have evolved over time, as the methods and scope of wars themselves changed. More modernly, as armies, wars and theaters of operation expanded — so that the gestalt (i.e., a result which is greater than the sum total – see synergy) of the overall venture was more definitive — the phrase "lost its meaning."