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A lexical set is a group of words that share a particular phonological feature.. A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. . Most commonly, following the work of phonetician John C. Wells, a lexical set is a class of words in a language that share a certain vowel pho
A lexical set is a set of words (named with a designated element) that share a special characteristic. For example, words belonging to lexical set BATH have the /æ/ phoneme in the United States and /ɑː/ phoneme in Received Pronunciation. In addition, Wells is acknowledged as the source of the term rhotic to describe accents where the letter ...
A commonly-used system of lexical sets, devised by John C. Wells, is presented below; for each set, the corresponding phonemes are given for RP and General American, using the notation that will be used on this page.
The merger results in the FLEECE lexical set, as defined by John Wells. Words in the set that had ENE /iː/ (Middle English /eː/) are mostly spelled ee (meet, green, etc.), with a single e in monosyllables (be, me) or followed by a single consonant and a vowel letter (these, Peter), sometimes ie or ei (believe, ceiling), or irregularly (key ...
The name FOOT – STRUT split refers to the lexical sets introduced by Wells (1982) and identifies the vowel phonemes in the words. From a historical point of view, however, the name is inappropriate because the word foot did not have short /ʊ/ when the split happened, but it underwent shortening only later.
The table below shows the pronunciation of many of these words, classified according to the lexical sets of John Wells: TRAP for /æ/, BATH for RP /ɑː/ vs. General American /æ/, PALM for /ɑː/, THOUGHT for /ɔː/, FACE for /eɪ/.
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Words are grouped by the phonemes (sounds) corresponding to ei or ie in the spelling; each phoneme is represented phonetically as at Help:IPA/English and, where applicable, by the keyword in John C. Wells' lexical sets. An asterisk* after a word indicates the pronunciation implied is one of several found.