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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.
For example, the word ghost was spelled gost in Middle English, until the Flemish spelling pattern was unintentionally substituted, and happened to be accepted. [4] Most of the spelling conventions in Modern English were derived from the phonemic spelling of a variety of Middle English , and generally do not reflect the sound changes that have ...
Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages. Sometimes a well-known namesake with the same spelling has a markedly different pronunciation. These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same).
Ough (orthography) Oxford spelling; P ... List of Scripps National Spelling Bee champions; Scripps National Spelling Bee; ... Silent letter; The Sound Pattern of ...
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. Phonemes spelled with multiple characters often indicate that either the phoneme or the script is alien to the ...
The word is intended to be pronounced in the same way as fish (/ f ɪ ʃ /), using these sounds: gh, pronounced / f / as in enough / ɪ ˈ n ʌ f / or tough / t ʌ f /; o, pronounced / ɪ / as in women / ˈ w ɪ m ɪ n /; ti, pronounced / ʃ / as in nation / ˈ n eɪ ʃ ən / or motion / ˈ m oʊ ʃ ən /.
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 ...
Likewise, many graphemes in English have multiple pronunciations and decodings, such as ough in words like thr ough, th ough, th ough t, thor ough, t ough, tr ough, and pl ough. There are 13 ways of spelling the schwa (the most common of all phonemes in English), 12 ways to spell /ei/ and 11 ways to spell /ɛ/. These kinds of incoherences can ...