This week our poll will look at the semantic domain of herbs and spices, and some of the pronunciation variability that emerges from it.

Poll Spice rack

Most English words ending in -omb follow one of three basic phonetic patterns:

/om/ (comb, coulomb)
/um/ (womb, tomb)
/ɔm/ (bomb)

Aplomb is one of those words that is not extraordinarily uncommon in print (at least, in certain fairly formal text genres) but significantly more rarely spoken aloud, and as with many of the words in this series, ( Read more... )

Here's one of the more challenging pronunciation polls I've done in a while, something suitable for a Monday morning. If you really don't have any idea, please do give it a shot anyway, answering with the first response that comes to your head.

And while I'm at it, I haven't mentioned my Dialect survey in a while. If you haven't answered, I'd ( Read more... )

I've got nothing. Well, almost nothing.

It's been nearly a month since my pronunciation poll on dynasty, with its two variants (as several perceptive commenters noted, they should properly be construed as DIE-nuh-stee and DIN-nuh-stee, with the n syllabified in the second syllable). And every week or so I think to myself, "Gee, I wonder if any ( Read more... )

Poll Dynasty

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I can't recall having heard the word 'vestige' pronounced with second-syllable stress and the long vowel [i:], until a couple of months ago when I heard it used in a podcast. I immediately wondered whether it was a dialectal variant or an 'eye-dialect' related to the more common prestige, which has these features, and which is the only other ( Read more... )

I'll be interested to see if there is any variation in this week's words, although having said that, there almost certainly will be more than I suspect ...

Poll Vestige

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The verb err 'to make a mistake' is rather uncommon today, which is quite striking, given that it has a long history in English (back to the 14th century) and has no obvious synonym; 'mistake' as a verb always means 'to misunderstand or misapprehend'. Probably most commonly encountered today in the phrase from Alexander Pope, 'To err is human, to ( Read more... )

Okay, let's see if I can keep up a good trend and get this poll series restarted. Just to clarify, I mean the verb 'err' meaning 'to make a mistake'.

Poll Err

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I have no idea why it took me so long to analyze this poll (a stressful spring semester, moving, and a new job probably contributed). Serif 'thin line finishing off a stroke of a letter' is a fascinating word that reflects a quite different category of pronunciation variability than we've seen in the past entries in this series ( Read more... )