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In most English varieties, there are five non-sibilant voiceless consonants that occur at the end of words: / p /, / t /, / k /, / f /, and / θ /; some varieties also have / x /. When the singular form ends in a voiceless consonant other than a sibilant, the plural is normally formed by adding / s / (a voiceless sibilant).
In linguistics, an elision or deletion is the omission of one or more sounds (such as a vowel, a consonant, or a whole syllable) in a word or phrase.However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. [1]
Also, some words only exhibit stress alternation in certain dialects of English. For a list of homographs with different pronunciations (heteronyms) see Heteronym (linguistics) . This list is incomplete ; you can help by adding missing items .
The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within a word. For instance, gh represents /f/ at the end of some words (tough / t ʌ f /) but not in others (plough / p l aʊ /). At the beginning of syllables, gh is pronounced /ɡ/, as in ghost / ɡ oʊ s t /.
Common in a vast majority of modern English dialects worldwide is the merger of as many as five Early Modern English vowels (/ɛ/, /ɛː/, /ə/, /ɪ/, and /ʊ/) into /ɜ/ when followed by an /r/ before a consonant or at the end of a syllable. Thus, the vowels in words like fir, fur, and fern are the same in almost all modern accents of English.
Letter frequencies, like word frequencies, tend to vary, both by writer and by subject. For instance, d occurs with greater frequency in fiction, as most fiction is written in past tense and thus most verbs will end in the inflectional suffix -ed / -d. One cannot write an essay about x-rays without using x frequently. Different authors have ...
Expletive infixation is a process by which an expletive or profanity is inserted into a word, usually for intensification. It is similar to tmesis, but not all instances are covered by the usual definition of tmesis because the words are not necessarily compounds.
The following is a list of common words sometimes ending with "-ise" (en-GB) especially in the UK popular press and "-ize" in American English (en-US) and Oxford spelling (en-GB-oxendict; formerly en-GB-oed) as used by the British Oxford English Dictionary, which uses the "-ize" ending for most of the same words as American English.