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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.
If a common English rendering of the non-English name exists (Venice, Nikita Khrushchev), its pronunciation, if necessary, should be indicated before the non-English one. For English words and names, pronunciation should normally be omitted for common words or when obvious from the spelling; use it only for loanwords from other languages (coup ...
A spelling pronunciation is the pronunciation of a word according to its spelling when this differs from a longstanding standard or traditional pronunciation. Words that are spelled with letters that were never pronounced or that were not pronounced for many generations or even hundreds of years have increasingly been pronounced as written, especially since the arrival of mandatory schooling ...
The pronunciation of the vowel of the prefix di-in words such as dichotomy, digest (verb), dilate, dilemma, dilute, diluvial, dimension, direct, dissect, disyllable, divagate, diverge, diverse, divert, divest, and divulge as well as their derivational forms vary between / aɪ / and / ɪ / or / ə / in both British and American English.
Some words contain silent letters, which do not represent any sound in modern English pronunciation. Examples include the l in talk, half, calf, etc., the w in two and sword, gh as mentioned above in numerous words such as though, daughter, night, brought, and the commonly encountered silent e (discussed further below).
For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes: the initial "th" sound, the "r" sound, and a vowel sound. The phonemes in that and many other English words do not always correspond directly to the letters used to spell them (English orthography is not as strongly phonemic as that of many other languages).
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography (i.e. the spelling does not reliably indicate pronunciation). There are two basic types of pronunciation respelling:
In English grammar, orthoepy is the study of correct pronunciation prescribed for Standard English.This originally was understood to mean Received Pronunciation specifically, but other standards have emerged and been accepted since the early 20th century (e.g., General American, General Australian).