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:
Table 10.1. Vowels
| 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 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’!)