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The English language is peppered with wonderfully weird spelling/pronunciation combinations. For example

  • colonel, pronounced kur-nl, probably my favorite, there isn't even an r in the word!
  • Gloucester, pronounced glos-ter
  • Worcestershire, pronounced woos-ter-sheer

And the list goes on, wikipedia has an extensive list of strangely pronounced spelled names here. No one unfamiliar with these words would be able to guess how to pronounce them, their pronunciation is usually the product of their particular history. Colonel, for example comes from the French colonel and has kept its original spelling but not its pronunciation.

So, is there a word to describe words whose pronunciation cannot be inferred from their spelling?

herisson
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terdon
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    They're not strangely pronounced. They're strangely *spelled*. And every English word is strangely spelled, since English spelling was developed for a different language, and doesn't work very well on modern English. At all. Spelling English words correctly is such a rare phenomenon, in fact, that the National Spelling Bee is front-page news in the United States. Speakers of languages with reasonable orthographies like Finnish or German are always amazed at this. – John Lawler Jun 02 '13 at 16:24
  • If you're actually wondering how these came about, consult David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Every word has its own unique history, consisting of all its billions of uses in the mouths and conversations and lives of all the speakers of the language. And then there's the historie ov theyre spelings... – John Lawler Jun 02 '13 at 16:32
  • @JohnLawler thanks for the link but what I am really wondering is whether there is a term to describe such words. – terdon Jun 02 '13 at 17:14
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    It's been knocking around for about 150 years as a a constructed word used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling, so I expect quite a lot of people would now be able to read ghoti as a "variant" spelling of fish. The smartasses might even say it spells a "silent" word - *gh as in though (/ðoʊ/); o as in people (/'piːpl/); t as in ballet (/'bæleɪ/); i as in business (/'bɪznəs/)*. – FumbleFingers Jun 02 '13 at 17:21
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    Not that I know of. Words of that description are the norm, not the exception. All English tense vowels are spelled strangely, for instance. The rest of the world says [life] when it sees life, but English readers say [layf]. – John Lawler Jun 02 '13 at 17:22
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    @FumbleFingers: that trick would be even easier in Irish, where about half the letters are silent (you're sposta know which ones, natch). Irish is about the only language I know of with a Latin orthography that's designed worse than English. – John Lawler Jun 02 '13 at 17:35
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    @JohnLawler try French. It is by far and away the most oddly spelled language I have ever come across. For example, to produce the sound ˈbō-(ˌ)kü (boucou in phonetic English) the French write beaucoup. Never mind the sheer mass of unpronounced letter left hanging at the end of various words. A friend has suggested that French spelling can be traced back to medieval scribes charging by the letter, who therefore had a vested interest in making words as long as possible. – terdon Jun 02 '13 at 17:43
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    @FumbleFingers thanks for the silent ghoti! I knew fish hadn't considered the silent version, nice. – terdon Jun 02 '13 at 18:21
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    French is much better than English. The rules are quite precise and if you know them you can pronounce French perfectly from the spelled version (assuming you can pronounce it perfectly in the first place), whether you're familiar with the words or not. It doesn't work the other way -- you can't predict the spelling from the sound. But it does work spelling-to-pronunciation. Finnish and German work both ways. English doesn't work either way. – John Lawler Jun 02 '13 at 19:39
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    @JohnLawler I disagree that in French the spelling uniquely determines the sound. The word plus, for example, is pronounced with or without the s depending on context. Likewise fils (son) and fils (threads). Thirty miles north of Paris (silent final s in French) is the historic town of Senlis (hard final s). – Lachlan Dominic Apr 21 '15 at 14:13
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    @Lachlan: OK, it's not perfect. But it only fails in special circumstances, with a limited number of words. English spelling fails in roughly half the words, in all kinds of circumstances. It's a shoddy product, that's all. – John Lawler Apr 21 '15 at 15:59

4 Answers4

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The Wikipedia article on the topic simply refers to these as irregularities, though one might also call them idiosyncrasies or anomalies - though none of those terms refer specifically to words with unusual spelling / pronunciation.

I think the best word to describe such irregularities is aphonetic, though that word seems relatively rare. I didn't find it listed in any dictionary, but here's an example from one of the documents in that Ngram search:

enter image description here

p.s.w.g
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  • Doesn't aphonetic mean not pronounced? It should based on the word's etymology. – terdon Jun 02 '13 at 18:19
  • @terdon aphonic means unpronounced -- Like I said, I wasn't able to find it in any dictionary, but a look through some of the documents where it's used, it seems to contrasted with phonetic (i.e. phonetic spelling v.s. aphonetic spelling). – p.s.w.g Jun 02 '13 at 18:48
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Someone has suggested that "lef-tenant" originated in a euphemism for toilet: loo (hence, lef instead of loo). See http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst7986_Why-do-the-British-say--leftenant--when-they-mean-lieutenant-.aspx, and peterhewett (his explanation). His explanation may be fanciful, but if accurate it would not be the first time pronunciation has been changed because of a potentially embarrassing way to pronounce a word.

In answer to your question, I can't think of a single word for the phenomenon. For a humorous (British, humourous) "take" on spelling and pronunciation (why isn't it spelled pronounciation?) inconsistencies, see http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/english.html. By the way, I credit an EL&U contributor for this cite; I just can't recall his/her moniker.

rhetorician
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0

I'm fairly certain the word is syncope:

the loss of one or more sounds or letters in the interior of a word (as in fo'c'sle for forecastle) - MW

anongoodnurse
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Nnamdi Ejiogu
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    Hi and welcome to the site! We expect answers to be more thorough here, one-word answers should always be accompanied by a definition. That said, while one of the meanings of syncope does apply to a small subset of words that are not pronounced as they are spelled, those are only a very small part of the phenomenon. None of the ones mentioned in my question qualify, for example. They have not only lost sounds, they have also gained sounds not present in the spelling at all. – terdon Apr 07 '15 at 21:56
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"Peppered"? English isn't lightly seasoned with these irregularities; someone removed the top from the pepper shaker and poured it all in!

I agree with p.s.w.g. The best name I can give is just "irregularity", or any other synonym for an outlier.

jägersnurf
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