pronunciation

UK/pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/US/pɹəˌnʌn.siˈeɪ.ʃən/

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,796 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: pronunciations

Pronunciation is the way a word is spoken aloud. Which sounds, which syllable carries the stress.

English makes this harder than most languages, because the spelling stopped matching the sound centuries ago and nobody ever fixed it. Dictionaries solve the problem with the phonetic alphabet, printed in the brackets after each headword. The word takes of, and you can talk about the pronunciation of a name or somebody's pronunciation generally. Note the spelling itself, since there is no ou in the middle even though pronounce has one, and that is among the commonest errors in English.

Definitions of pronunciation

1nounpronunciationThe way in which a word is spoken.B1+
“There are two accepted pronunciations of that word.”

Where it comes from

Pronunciation is proclaiming. Latin prōnūntiāre meant to announce publicly, from nūntiāre, to announce, so the word is about being heard rather than being correct.

Latin
prōnūntiātiō
Middle French
prononciation
Middle English
pronunciacioun
English, today
pronunciation

Built from

prōnūntiāre · Latin — proclaim
prō- · Latin — for
nūntiāre · Latin — announce

From Middle English pronunciacioun, from Middle French prononciation, pronunciation, from Latin prōnūntiātiō, noun of action from perfect passive participle prōnūntiātus, from verb prōnūntiāre (“proclaim”), from prō- (“for”) + nūntiāre (“announce”). a doublet of pronuntiatio.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in News & Communication, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 21 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

pronunciation in the wild

Through this extensive vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels altered.
Great Vowel Shift
The study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other features of standard British English, such as vocabulary, grammar, and style, are not considered.
Received Pronunciation
Words' pronunciations can be found in reference works such as dictionaries.
Pronunciation
General-purpose dictionaries typically only include standard pronunciations, but regional or dialectal pronunciations may be found in more specific works.
Pronunciation
Like many languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect.
English phonology

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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