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There are many English words with silent letters, words like gnome or island that are spelt with consonants that aren't pronounced, but are there any words that work the other way round, with a pronunciation that includes extra sounds or syllables that are not in the spelling?

I can't think of any real examples, hence this question, but a made-up example would be if gnome were spelt nome but pronounced with a g at the start. Or if people started pronouncing offer as "ofter" as a sort of weird parallel to after.

Note: I don't mean words like rough, where the f sound is spelt gh, because in those cases the spelling does still include letters (however seemingly illogical) for each of the sounds.

V2Blast
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nnnnnn
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – tchrist Jul 23 '19 at 01:20
  • By allowing answers to include extra syllables and vowels that are not represented by letters , you're opening a Pandora box. The question's become too broad – Mari-Lou A Jul 23 '19 at 10:54
  • Syllables aren't in the spelling! – Araucaria - Him Jul 23 '19 at 12:02
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    @Mari-LouA - The point of the question was essentially are there any words with the "opposite" of silent letters, so it was kind of a yes/no question but with examples to prove the "yes". So broad, but not too broad I think. Many of the examples given seem obvious now in hindsight, but yesterday when I asked the question I felt there were such words but had a mental blank and couldn't think of any at all, so this has been helpful for me, and I hope might be helpful or at least interesting to others. – nnnnnn Jul 23 '19 at 12:02
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    This is similar to my (only) question on this site, but it's got some great answer's that my question didn't get. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/37629/words-with-pronunciations-more-complex-than-spelling – bdsl Jul 23 '19 at 14:23
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    Not sure it really counts, but the word vegetable(s) is occasionally heard pronounced as vegestable(s) for humorous effect – that’s an extra s that’s not there in the spelling. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 23 '19 at 17:32
  • Knock yourself out with these answers posted on a locked question: What words are commonly mispronounced by literate people who read them before they heard them? – Mari-Lou A Jul 24 '19 at 10:17

16 Answers16

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Lieutenant in British English is pronounced with an f: /lɛfˈtɛnənt/.

curiousdannii
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    While we're on the topic of army ranks, would you like to mention colonel? :) – Tanner Swett Jul 22 '19 at 13:33
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    @Tanner not quite an answer to this question, for while it has weird vowels and a silent "l" there's no extra consonant. – curiousdannii Jul 22 '19 at 13:53
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    I always thought of the /f/ coming from the "u" letter, which would have denoted a /v/ sound in earlier spelling systems. – TaliesinMerlin Jul 22 '19 at 14:07
  • @Talies Could be. Wikipedia notes there was a rare spelling in French of "luef". The letter F is older than U however. – curiousdannii Jul 22 '19 at 14:18
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    Facepalm - I always, for no real reason, assumed that in the UK/British military, Leftenant was a different rank than Lieutenant. ....Either in the a different branch (e.g. Army vs Navy), or a difference for Commissioned/Non-Commissioned ranks, or ...something. Learned something new today :O – BruceWayne Jul 22 '19 at 14:22
  • Similarly the often-heard English pronunciation of constable as counstable – I cant think of any other cases where orthographic represents diphthongal /aʊ/. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 22 '19 at 14:32
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    @curiousdanii: colonel has an /r/ in American English; it's a homophone of kernel. – Peter Shor Jul 22 '19 at 15:50
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    The internet tells me that dachshund does contain letters mapping to all of the sounds in "doxen", but I don't believe it... – user3067860 Jul 22 '19 at 16:42
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    @user3067860 "d" maps to "d", "a" maps to "o", "chs" maps to "ks" which maps to "x", the creator of that phonetic pronunciation probably intended a silent "h", "u" maps to "e", "nd" maps to "n", where, again, the creator probably treated the ending "d" as silent. I usually pronounce this word (Midwest American English) closer to "doxhend", which is closer to the original German pronunciation. – probably_someone Jul 22 '19 at 17:19
  • @PeterShor Wiktionary says neither has a full r consonant. It has this for US, using an r colored vowel: ˈkɝnəl. But maybe people differ in their analysis of it. – curiousdannii Jul 22 '19 at 23:29
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    @PeterShor 'Colonel' and 'kernel' have distinct 'r' sounds in my Scottish accent, much more pronounced that wikipedia apparently suggests, though they still aren't homophones, more like 'curr-n'l' and 'kErnel'. – Spagirl Jul 23 '19 at 09:19
  • @JanusBahsJacquet can you explain in a different way what you mean by 'constable' sounding like 'counstable'? To me 'coun' would be pronounced pretty close to 'cow' with an 'n' added and I can't relate that to a pronunciation I've ever heard of 'constable'. The closest would be 'cunstable'. – Spagirl Jul 23 '19 at 09:22
  • @Spagirl That’s exactly what I mean, like count with an s before the t. I don’t recall hearing it in Scottish English (I’m going mainly by tv shows here), but it’s a common pronunciation in English detective shows. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 23 '19 at 09:25
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Not to put you on the spot, but can you name one of the shows? If I can come up with a specific actor I might be able to work out how they say it, because despite having English parents and living there for 11 years, I can't currently map your description to something I recognise. Are you drawing a distinction between the sounds you'd get from 'counst' and 'cunst'? – Spagirl Jul 23 '19 at 09:35
  • @Spagirl Yes, I’d call cunstable /ˈkʌnstəbəl/ more or less the standard (I hear it more frequently than /ˈkɒnstəbəl/, at any rate), and counstable definitely a variant. I can’t recall specific instances of it, it’s just something I’ve always noticed when I do hear it. I’m almost, but not entirely, certain John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) in Midsomer Murders says it that way. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 23 '19 at 09:41
  • @JanusBahsJacquet i can't look up recordings of him right now, but I'll try to remember to later. Thanks for humouring my curiosity. – Spagirl Jul 23 '19 at 09:45
  • @Spagirl Incidentally, searching Google Books for counstable (as such) does give me a few hundred results, spanning from the 1600s all the way up until the 21st century, which would seem to support it as an actual variant pronunciation. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 23 '19 at 09:45
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I'll maybe look at some of those. To be clear, I wasn't casting aspersions as to veracity, bust trying to understand just what the sounds were in this pronunciation. – Spagirl Jul 23 '19 at 10:24
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    @curiousdannii colonel has an r sound in all dialects I am aware of. And yet is always spelled without an r. It's the most obvious example of such a word I can think of since it's dialect independent and always contains a sound that could never be inferred from the spelling. – terdon Jul 23 '19 at 10:37
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    @terdon Definitely doesn't in my own non-rhotic AusEng. I assume it's similar for other non-rhotic accents. – curiousdannii Jul 23 '19 at 11:00
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    @curiousdannii really? I stand corrected, thanks. I assume it's still a homophone of kernel though, right? So there's at least a e that isn't in the spelling? – terdon Jul 23 '19 at 11:14
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    @terdon Right, they're homophones. Same vowel as in 'fur'. And 'fir'. ;) – curiousdannii Jul 23 '19 at 11:36
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    @curiousdannii It has an /r/, just not an [r]. So you’re correct that it doesn’t have an r sound, but it does have an r phoneme (unless you choose to completely separate non-rhotic dialects phonemically from rhotic ones and create separate phonemes for r-coloured vowels, that is; but that’s rather uneconomic in most cases). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 23 '19 at 11:52
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    @JanusBahsJacquet I often hear an extra "t" in the pronunciation of "constable", between the "n" and the "s", but I think it's a deliberate mutation in order to denigrate our excellent Police officers. :) – Phil M Jones Jul 23 '19 at 14:13
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I’ve watched a lot of videos snippets now and never catch him saying ‘constable’... his pronunciation shall remain forever a mystery to me. – Spagirl Jul 23 '19 at 19:55
  • @Spagirl I think I just happened upon one on telly which I think is a match (though I sort of just caught it after it was said, so I could be mistaken). Endeavour, S3E3 (“Prey”), somewhere around the 1:05:00 mark. WPC Trewlove has just briefed the team about a vial of musk having been stolen from a lab, and CS Bright says, “That’s first-rate work, counstable”. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 27 '19 at 11:51
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I’ll look that out next time I’m on YouTube – Spagirl Jul 27 '19 at 17:43
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Probably "yes", but it depends on what you mean. There isn't actually a clear way to identify which sounds in a word correspond to which letters: for example, rough, which you say has letters for "each of the sounds", could be analyzed as r- + -ou- + -gh or as r- + -o- + ugh. When similar issues arise with other words, it makes it pretty subjective to decide whether the word has consonant sounds that "aren't part of the spelling" or that just have an complex relationship to the spelling.

Some words that could be considered to meet your criteria:

Consonants

  • Any word with an epenthetic voiceless plosive between a nasal and a following consonant. For many speakers, a productive process causes a sound like /t/, /p/ or /k/ to be inserted after the sounds /n/, /m/ or /ŋ/ respectively in various environments. In most words, the epenthetic plosive is not written, so you could say that there is a /p/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of warmth, dreamt, hamster, seamstress, a /t/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of sense, glance, a /k/ in the pronunciation but not the spelling of strength, angst.

  • In eighth and in one pronunciation of threshold, a digraph that usually represents a single sound corresponds instead to two sounds: /tθ/ and /ʃh/ respectively. You could say that the /t/ in eighth or the /h/ in that pronunciation of threshold isn't part of the spelling.

    Something similar applies for speakers who use the pronunciation /haıtθ/ instead of /haıt/: whether it's spelled height or heighth, it seems like one of the two sounds at the end is not explicitly represented in the spelling.

  • In some accents of British English, the vowels found in words like saw and draw is regularly followed by epenthetic /r/ before another vowel. This means that the words sawing and drawing are pronounced with an /r/ that "isn't part of the spelling".

Vowels or syllables

  • Many words with syllabic resonants, or sequences of a schwa followed by a resonant, have no particular letter that marks the syllabicity. Words ending in -thm or -sm are the most obvious example. Other examples are more dialect dependent, but words like hour are disyllabic for some speakers.
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herisson
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    Good answer. Hamster, etc., exhibit exactly the sort of thing I had in mind. Drawing is an interesting one that also fits my admittedly vague and subjective criteria. – nnnnnn Jul 22 '19 at 06:14
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    I like the mention of saw and draw in BrE. It's a peculiar little detail that I like about BrE. – Ian Jul 22 '19 at 14:39
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    Regarding the edit, I'm used to hearing and saying eighteen with just the one t sound, but I can see why some people might say it the way you described. – nnnnnn Jul 22 '19 at 14:53
  • The /t/ sound in sense and glance was very hard for me to sense (pun intended) until I started thinking about the difference between glans and glance (the "ce" and "s" providing a supposedly identical sound). – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Jul 22 '19 at 17:45
  • I remember that some time in the '90s, an /r/ appeared in "Diana and Charles" (and other combinations of words, but this is a useful one to remember). – Jos Jul 23 '19 at 09:11
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    You say: eighteen is usually pronounced like "eight teen" but actually it is normally pronounced "ay-teen" unless the speaker is trying VERY hard to make it clear, eg over a radio. – MikeB Jul 23 '19 at 11:23
  • @Jos Similarly "Law and Order" became "Laura Norder".
    sumelic: for no good reason, "threshold" really cheered me up - what a cracking example :)     – Phil M Jones Jul 23 '19 at 14:09
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"Colonel", which is pronounced identically to "kernel", as though the "lo" in the middle was somehow an "r".

David Rice
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Do you count words borrowed from another language that pronounces consonants differently? If so, I'd nominate pizza, which in American English is pronounced with a T (peet'-za).

There's also the common pronunciation of "sandwich" as "samwich", but that's a replacement, not an insertion.

jeffB
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    In the case of pizza, the pronunciation is just recognizing that it's an Italian word rather than an English word. – John Bentin Jul 22 '19 at 20:16
  • Thus the preface about whether or not you count borrowed words. Note, though, that piazza is often pronounced without the T, at least on this side of the Atlantic. – jeffB Jul 22 '19 at 20:20
  • Borrowed words that have retained their foreign spelling and (perhaps approximate) pronunciation weren't what I was thinking of originally, but taken as what is now a standard English word I think pizza qualifies, especially given that the majority of other English words with a double z don't have that same t sound. – nnnnnn Jul 23 '19 at 00:26
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    I know of at least one language (Hebrew) where the 'tz' sound is considered a single distinct consonant sound with its own letter. – Arcanist Lupus Jul 23 '19 at 13:25
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    And in German, the letter z's sound is tz. – jeffB Jul 23 '19 at 16:07
  • @jeffB Which is "this side of the Atlantic"? I guess you're on the wrong side, because over here, piazza is pronounced like it's Italian, and not at all like plaza, even though the two words are very closely related. – Andrew Leach Jul 24 '19 at 07:50
  • @AndrewLeach Well, I'm not on the right side, at least if you're looking down with north to the top. Or if you're watching the news. – jeffB Jul 24 '19 at 16:21
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Consonants that are pronounced but unmarked in spelling are relatively uncommon. There are a finite number of historical sound changes, and most of them involve either transforming one sound into another (assimilation; dissimilation) or removing the sound from a word (elision or deletion). ("Historical Sound Changes," Nativlang.com)

Adding a sound to a word is known as epenthesis. In many cases, consonants added as a result of epenthesis result from dialect features like rhoticity (ThoughtCo). While we often think of "r" being dropped in dialects (Boston: "Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd"), sometimes they are added. In the American South, I grew up with "sherbert" for the word "sherbet"; the pronunciation is common enough for Merriam-Webster to describe it as a variant.

Non-dialect epenthesis resulting in an un-spelled but pronounced consonant is less common, since our spelling system was standardized relatively recently. So sounds like the "p" in pumpkin (historically also pumkin according to the OED) are marked in the spelling.

Here are a few other examples that show a range of consonant insertions:

  • "warsh" for wash (placed in the Mid-US in this SE question)
  • "hain't" for ain't (Appalachian English)
  • "drawring" for drawing (British English, passim)
  • "hampster" for hamster (common; Merriam-Webster notes the /p/ option)
  • "warmpth" for warmth (common; again, M-W notes the optional /p/)
TaliesinMerlin
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    What would it mean for something to be "non-dialect"? I guess you mean "in Standard English", but even then, American English and British English have quite different "standard" forms. I'm also surprised to see the assertion that spelling was standardized "relatively recently", given the vast number of spellings that demonstrate abandoned pronunciations. For that matter, there are spellings that have ended up standardised in ways that never matched pronunciation, like "debt". – IMSoP Jul 22 '19 at 16:49
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  • The usage would have to be common across multiple large dialect areas, such that the usage no longer characterizes a single dialect group. That development takes time. 2. Pre-caffeine brain; "relatively recently" is 200-300 years ago, as distinguished from 1000+ years of English where spelling was not standardized. Yes, lots of standardized spellings represent abandoned pronunciations, but most pronunciation changes are transformations or deletions of sounds or epenthesis of vowels.
    • – TaliesinMerlin Jul 22 '19 at 17:31
  • Besides dropping r’s in Boston, New Englanders also add an r to words ending in a vowel followed by a word beginning with one. The late senator Edward Kennedy’s speeches are remarkable for this. “Asia, Africa, and Latin America” becomes Asier, Afriker, and Latin America.” – Xanne Jul 23 '19 at 05:14