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There is a very productive suffix in English coming from Latin: '-or': doctor, actor, aviator, etc. meaning 'the person that does the thing'.

It is spelled '-or' but is pronounced to rhyme with the English Native spelling of the similar meaning '-er' or in IPA for American English as from the NURSE lexical set: /ər/ or /ɚ/ and in non-rhotic BrE /əː/.

Pretty much all words ending in '-tor' are pronounced this way.

  • /'dɑk təɹ/
  • /'æk təɹ/
  • /in 'ven təɹ/

Except for 'mentor'.

  • /'men ɔɹ/

It is pronounced with the 'NORTH' vowel: AmE /ɔɹ/ and BrE /oː/.

There doesn't seem to be any logical (similar history) or phonetic (rule based) reason for this. From an automated search of words, only 'guarantor', 'or', 'nor', and 'tor' had the same final syllable pronunciation, but none sharing the same stress pattern with 'mentor' (and the last three are not the suffix anyway). And 'inventor', which is very close except for the first syllable, does not share the last syllable.

Can anyone throw any light on this? Was 'mentor' imported or created special? Is it a 'spelling' or 'faux-highbrow' pronunciation like sometimes 'actor' or 'realtor' might be pronounced? Or is it just an anomaly as they happen sometimes?

Note: for pronunciation reference I used the CMU Pronouncing dictionary for automating the pronunciation search and facilitating making general categorical statements like 'There are no other words like...' . It has only one pronunciation for each word (i.e. no variants), and only AmE (so I'm unsure about some of the BrE versions).

Mitch
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    How would you pronounce condor? The CMU Pronouncing dictionary you linked to shows it using the same sound as doctor, but howjsay.com and I both pronounce it like we would guarantor, not doctor (condor, doctor). – terdon Feb 22 '18 at 16:47
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    Hmm ... I definitely pronounce it to rhyme with "doctor" in at least unstressed contexts. – Azor Ahai -him- Feb 22 '18 at 16:52
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    @terdon in fact condor, to my ears, is a much better contrast -- mentor (despite the dictionary) often ends the same as the others – Chris H Feb 22 '18 at 16:54
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    @ChrisH yes, I feel I would never rhyme condor with doctor, while I might not always stress the final -or in mentor. – terdon Feb 22 '18 at 16:55
  • @terdon hmm... I agree. I don't know how I missed that one. It's not part of the 'agentive' suffix (a doer), but it's very close. – Mitch Feb 22 '18 at 17:03
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    @ChrisH I feel there's free variation for 'mentor' between the two pronunciations, with (informal guess) the '-tore' more common. But none of the others (or very rare) are pronounced like that (even though the spelling is suggestive of '-tore'). – Mitch Feb 22 '18 at 17:34
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    Real actors stress the second syllable of actor ;) – Rupert Morrish Feb 22 '18 at 21:44
  • to me mentor, condor, actor have the "or" sound, whereas doctor and aviator have the "er" - except Aviator sunglasses, which are "or"... – Rory Alsop Feb 22 '18 at 23:24
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    Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulat-or!! – Spencer Feb 23 '18 at 10:22
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    I wonder whether the modern pronunciation is also influenced (even if naively) by the or/ee formation - lessor/lessee, guarantor/guarantee, mentor/mentee - where the stress on the suffix can be used to emphasise the agency. – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Feb 27 '18 at 23:19
  • @Chappo Yeah, that's kinda the motivation that got me going on all this. Officially 'lessor' is pronounced like 'lesser', but I often feel compelled to do the spelling pronunciation. Or 'realtor', it feels wrong either way. – Mitch Feb 28 '18 at 00:39
  • I agree with “realtor”! But I say “lessor” like “mentor” (perhaps subconsciously to distinguish from “lesser” and avoid potential confusion in my audience), and Oxford says this is an equally valid pronunciation. – Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Feb 28 '18 at 01:14

2 Answers2

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Most likely, Mentor is pronounced differently from actor etc because it was derived from a name.

"wise adviser," 1750, from Greek Mentor, friend of Odysseus and adviser of Telemachus (but often actually Athene in disguise) in the "Odyssey," perhaps ultimately meaning "adviser," because the name appears to be an agent noun of mentos "intent, purpose, spirit, passion" from PIE *mon-eyo- (source also of Sanskrit man-tar- "one who thinks," Latin mon-i-tor "one who admonishes"), causative form of root *men- (1) "to think." The general use of the word probably is via later popular romances, in which Mentor played a larger part than he does in Homer. - etymonline

Here are a couple other Greek names that follow this pronunciation (links are to wikipedia):

  • Agenor - /əˈdʒiːnɔːr/; Greek: Ἀγήνωρ, Agēnor
  • Hector - Ἕκτωρ Hektōr, pronounced [héktɔːr]
Lawrence
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    Possibly, but the same could be said...well, does a doctor 'doct'? I did not know the provenance of the term, and I suspect most people don't especially on first seeing the term. And in a similar vein most people don't know classical Greek pronunciation. – Mitch Feb 22 '18 at 15:03
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    @Mitch True, though I don't know that Doctor was ever a Greek name :) . I've added a couple of other Greek names with similar trailing 'or' pronunciation (to Mentor). I picked ones that included IPA to help with pronunciation. – Lawrence Feb 22 '18 at 15:13
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    The doct root comes from the word for "to lead"/"to teach." But as you said in your original post, that's from Latin. I'm wondering if the reason for the pronunciation of mentor isn't that it's a proper name, but that it's from Greek. – spoko Feb 22 '18 at 15:13
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    @Lawrence Good find on 'Hector'. But in English, the name Hector, as well as the verb meaning to badger someone, is usually pronounced /'hek tər/. – Mitch Feb 22 '18 at 16:23
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    @Mitch That's also true, but this is a plausibility argument based on the -ɔːr pronunciation of (some) Greek names. How some names and similar-sounding verbs are now pronounced in English is a different matter. Even mentoring is drifting (or has drifted) to the -ər pronunciation. – Lawrence Feb 22 '18 at 22:41
  • It's interesting that the word "adviser" came up here, too. One who advises, yet it does not end in "-or". – Octopus Feb 22 '18 at 23:29
  • @Octopus 'advisor' is a common spelling variant of 'adviser'. There's also 'leader', one who leads. The '-or' suffix is more Latiny and '-er' more Germanicky, but that's just the suffix; the root can be most anything. – Mitch Feb 22 '18 at 23:58
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    @Mitch The suffix is actually (historically speaking) -ter/-tor, not -or. Greek has maintained the original distribution of stressed -ter vs unstressed -tor; Latin has essentially generalised -tor everywhere. It’s a verbal suffix, added straight on to the root, so yes, a doctor originally doc_’ed (the verb is _doceō). The reason we have so many forms with no t in English is that the largest classes of verbs in Latin had a root in -ā-, giving -ātor with an intervocalic /t/; and single intervocalic consonants were usually lost in Old French, so roughly -ātor > -aor > -or. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 23 '18 at 08:53
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: Also, “or” also occurs sometimes in Latin after s (professor, predecessor, incisor) due to the spirantization of t-t to s/ss. – herisson Feb 23 '18 at 16:09
  • @sumelic Yes, with verbal roots that end in PIE d or t. (I included that in an earlier version of the previous comment, but it wouldn’t fit, and I figured the French one was more frequent.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 24 '18 at 00:14
  • Also, this is one instance where Etymonline gets things quite muddled. Latin monitor is regularly formed (within Latin!) from the verb moneō, which is indeed from the old causative *mon-éi̯e- to the root *men- ‘think’. But Greek μέντωρ and Sanskrit mántar- are definitely not from the causative: they are PIE formations, straight from the root, *mén-tor-. The causative of an identical root (*men- ‘stay, remain’) actually exists in Sanskrit: mānáyati ‘dwells’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 24 '18 at 00:26
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The "Pronouncing Shakespeare's Words: A Guide from A to Zounds" appears to suggest that the pronunciation has something to do with on-stage usage during Shakespeare times:

  • Mentor, orator and other words of this class that are not commonly used in day-to-day life (including "Shakespearean" words like servitor, proditor, paritor) are often pronounced on- and off-stage with /-or/, but the traditional pronunciation is /-ur/, as found in most of our common words ending in -or (actor, instructor, doctor).

Garner's Modern English Usage refers to the pronunciation of mentor as "ˈmɛntər" and adds that:

  • the overpronounced "mɛnˌtɔr" is probably dominant in AmE today.
user 66974
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