Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
This is a set of lists of English personal and place names having spellings that are counterintuitive to their pronunciation because the spelling does not accord with conventional pronunciation associations. Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages.
Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or whose meanings have diverged to the point that present-day speakers have little historical understanding: for ...
Many sounds are spelled using different letters or multiple letters, and for those words whose pronunciation is predictable from the spelling, the sounds denoted by the letters depend on the surrounding letters. For example, th represents two different sounds (the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives) (see Pronunciation of English th), and ...
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language.. These charts give a diaphoneme for each sound, followed by its realization in different dialects.
Messing up pronunciations can be a source of both annoyance and amusement, but language learning platform Babbel has put together a handy guide to stop you putting your foot in it.
Triple heteronyms are extremely rare in English; three examples, sin, mobile and does, are listed below. Proper nouns can sometimes be heteronyms. For example, the final syllable in the US state of Oregon is pronounced /-ə n / (or /-ɪ n /), while in the name of the village of Oregon in Wisconsin, the final syllable is pronounced /-ɒ n /.
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. [1]
In English orthography, the letter k normally reflects the pronunciation of [] and the letter g normally is pronounced /ɡ/ or "hard" g , as in goose, gargoyle and game; /d͡ʒ/ or "soft" g , generally before i or e , as in giant, ginger and geology; or /ʒ/ in some words of French origin, such as rouge, beige and genre.