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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 .
English orthography typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters a, e, i, o, u , as well as y , which may also be a consonant depending on context. However, outside of abbreviations, there are a handful of words in English that do not have vowels, either because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters ...
Note that some words contain an ae which may not be written æ because the etymology is not from the Greek -αι-or Latin -ae-diphthongs. These include: In instances of aer (starting or within a word) when it makes the sound IPA [ɛə]/[eə] (air). Comes from the Latin āër, Greek ἀήρ. When ae makes the diphthong / eɪ / (lay) or / aɪ ...
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom; List of British words not widely used in the United States; List of South African English regionalisms; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: A–L; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z
ordinal number 5 one of five equal parts into which something is divided bottle of spirits ("a fifth of bourbon"), traditionally 1/5 of a US gallon, now the metric near-equivalent of 750 mL. to "plead the Fifth (Amendment)", i.e. refuse to testify against oneself in an incriminating manner filth (the filth) the police (derogatory slang)
Whereas the names of many letters sound alike, the set of replacement words can be selected to be as distinct from each other as possible, to minimise the likelihood of ambiguity or mistaking one letter for another. For example, if a burst of static cuts off the start of an English-language utterance of the letter J, it may be mistaken for A or K.
Many languages that use a form of the Latin alphabet have more vowel sounds than can be represented by the standard set of five vowel letters. In English spelling, the five letters a e i o and u can represent a variety of vowel sounds, while the letter y frequently represents vowels (as in e.g., "gym", "happy", or the diphthongs in "cry ...
item of street furniture serving as a receptacle for outgoing mail (UK: post box; letter box; pillar box); a receptacle for incoming paper mail (UK: letter box) main line: major railway line (as the West Coast Main Line); compare trunk: major vein (as for drug injection purposes) (orig. 1930s US slang); also used as a v.; main line stars