Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Ough is a four-letter sequence, a tetragraph, used in English orthography and notorious for its unpredictable pronunciation. [1] It has at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English , and no discernible patterns exist for choosing among them.
The variable outcome, along with other variable changes and the ambiguity of the Middle English spelling ou (either /ou̯/ or /uː/ in Early Middle English, accounts for the numerous pronunciations of Modern English words in -ough-(e.g. though, through, bough, rough, trough, thought, with -ough-pronounced /ou/, /uː/, /au/, /ʌf/, /ɒf/, /ɔː ...
Nowadays, the ligatures have been generally replaced by the digraphs ae and oe (encyclopaedia, diarrhoea) in British English or just e (encyclopedia, diarrhea) in American English, though both spell some words with only e (economy, ecology) and others with ae and oe (paean, amoeba, oedipal, Caesar).
In German, for example, the tetragraph tsch represents the sound of the English digraph ch. English does not have tetragraphs in native words (the closest is perhaps the sequence -ough in words like through), but chth and phth are true tetragraphs when found initially in words of Greek origin such as chthonic and phthisis.
The English words sphere /ˈsfɪər/ and sphinx /ˈsfɪŋks/, Greek loanwords, break the rule that two fricatives may not appear adjacently word-initially. Some English words, including thrash, three, throat, and throw, start with the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, the liquid /r/, or the /r/ cluster (/θ/+/r/).
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
The California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873 ), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...
The words given as examples for two different symbols may sound the same to you. For example, you may pronounce cot and caught the same, do and dew, or marry and merry. This often happens because of dialect variation (see our articles English phonology and International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects).