Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
victuals. c.1300, vitaylle (singular), from Anglo-Fr. and O.Fr. vitaille, from L.L. victualia "provisions," noun use of plural of victualis "of nourishment," from victus "livelihood, food, sustenance," from base of vivere "to live" (see vital). Spelling altered early 16c. to conform with Latin, but pronunciation remains "vittles."
For one thing, the Oxford English Dictionary doesn't have an entry for vittles, though it does for victuals. For another, in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, there are 126 hits for victuals and 117 for vittles. In contrast, in the British National Corpus, there are 25 hits for victuals and none for vittles.
Victuals is famously pronounced "vittles". But how is victualling, as in victualling yard, pronounced? I presume the "c" remains silent, but various unsourced and presumably autogenerated pronunciation videos suggest both "vittling" and "vittualing".
I am looking for a word with the definition "a word that is not spelled phonetically", that is, "a word that is pronounced very differently than the way it is spelled." For example, victuals (pronounced /vittels/) and colonel (pronounced /kernal/) are examples of _____, words that are pronounced very differently than the way they are spelled.
The supporting of life or health; maintenance: "to deliver in every morning six beeves, forty sheep, and other victuals for my sustenance" (Jonathan Swift) – 9dan Commented Nov 25, 2011 at 13:53
In The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope has one character say vittles and another say victuals. Note that these are not homonyms because only one word is being spelled. In saying "two quite different spellings," I am trying to eliminate spelling variants such as today vs. to-day, colour vs. color, or the example I gave, complete vs. compleat.
‘A fairish dew’, says another who has got a shilling and a lot of victuals away with him for the same. The other quotations use these spellings: Fair do's, fair do's, fair dos, Fair do, fair do's. The first of these is from 1941: 1941 L. A. G. Strong Bay 168 Come on, Doctor. Fair do's.
Jonathon Green, The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (1984) offers a bit of a twist on that definition: bunfight n. a tea party, esp. with image of children struggling for sticky buns. This suggests a fight over buns rather than with buns.
For purposes of definition, the formula underlying the former phrase is "know(s) one's X", and the formula of the latter phrase is "do(es) not know the difference between X and Y". I do not know why the plural variant came to be preferred to the exclusion of the singular.
Definition 1 of blather is the meaning relevant to its use as an alternative to bullshit. For the second sense, you might do better with a phrase. I think that mendacious dissembling works well as a formal alternative to bullshit here. The Eleventh Collegiate defines the two components as follows: