|
|
April 2008Just Foolin' AroundAfter Senator Barack Obama used the word divisive three times in his speech on race in America, that adjective jumped onto the Top Twenty List for a day or two. We suspect the searches had less to do with the meaning of divisive than with Obama's pronunciation of it. He said \dih-VISS-iv\, a variant pronunciation which is preceded by the label also. The first pronunciation given at the entry is \dih-VYCE-iv\. Variant pronunciations marked also are considered standard, although they are appreciably less frequent than those not so noted. Although you can't search our online dictionaries for all the words with variant pronunciations, you can get some interesting results by typing the word pronunciation into the Definition field on the Advanced Search page. The search returns over 100 results from Americanize to wharl. assibilate... to convert to or replace by a sibilant sound or a sound of which a sibilant is one constituent (as when the pronunciation \ book word... a word learned solely or principally from reading and often understood without knowledge of its customary pronunciation cacoepy... bad pronunciation -- opposed to orthoepy eye dialect... the use of misspellings that are based on standard pronunciations (as sez for says or kow for cow) but are usually intended to suggest a speaker's illiteracy or his use of generally nonstandard pronunciations haplology... a contraction of a word by the omission of one or more similar sounds or syllables in pronunciation (as in \ rhotacism... a defective pronunciation of r; especially : substitution of some other sound for that of r spelling reform...a movement to modify conventional spelling so as to lessen or remove the differences between the orthography and the pronunciation of words |
indy
n\ for Indian becomes \
br
\ for library or \