Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all
entries that are neither dictionary words pronounced as in
standard English nor obvious compounds thereof. Slashes bracket
phonetic pronunciations, which are to be interpreted using the
following conventions:
Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or
back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks
a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If
no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal
accentuation on all syllables (this is common for
abbreviations).
Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter
`g' is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); `ch' is
soft ("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter `j' is the
sound that occurs twice in "judge". The letter `s' is always as
in "pass", never a z sound. The digraph `kh' is the guttural of
"loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of
"bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).
Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter
names; thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/.
/Z/ may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local
dialect.
Vowels are represented as follows:
/a/
back, that
/ah/
father, palm (see note)
/ar/
far, mark
/aw/
flaw, caught
/ay/
bake, rain
/e/
less, men
/ee/
easy, ski
/eir/
their, software
/i/
trip, hit
/i:/
life, sky
/o/
block, stock (see note)
/oh/
flow, sew
/oo/
loot, through
/or/
more, door
/ow/
out, how
/oy/
boy, coin
/uh/
but, some
/u/
put, foot
/y/
yet, young
/yoo/
few, chew
/[y]oo/
/oo/ with optional fronting as in `news' (/nooz/ or
/nyooz/)
The glyph /*/ is used for the `schwa' sound of unstressed or
occluded vowels (the one that is often written with an
upside-down `e'). The schwa vowel is omitted in syllables
containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, `kitten' and `color'
would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and
/kuhl'*r/.
Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found
in standard American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken
by TV network announcers and typical of educated speech in the
Upper Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul and Philadelphia).
However, we separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge in
standard American. This may help readers accustomed to accents
resembling British Received Pronunciation.
The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as
possible to map the pronunciations into their local dialect by
ignoring some subset of the distinctions we make. Speakers of
British RP, for example, can smash terminal /r/ and all
unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of southern
American will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and so forth.
(Standard American makes a good reference dialect for this
purpose because it has crisp consonants and more vowel
distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain
distinctions between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be
what your editor speaks.)
Entries with a pronunciation of `//' are written-only usages.
(No, Unix weenies, this does not mean `pronounce like
previous pronunciation'!)
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