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"Certiorari" has a different pronunciation in almost every dictionary I've checked. Almost all of them are five syllables.

And according to a 2014 article in the American Bar Association Journal, in published sound recordings, not even Supreme Court justices agree on the pronunciation of this word. Most used five syllables, one used four syllables, and two copped out and used the abbreviation ("cert").

I'm trying to choose one for myself -- to say out loud and to hear in my mind's ear when I'm reading.

The one that appealed to me the most has three syllables, from the Free Dictionary's legal dictionary. But it is marked as British. Is this acceptable in the US, or will people look at me funny if I use that one?

aparente001
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    It has five vowels. Which two were you planning on discarding to bring it down to three syllables? – tchrist Dec 25 '19 at 15:33
  • Four (badly transcribed "ser-shur-ar-ee") or five ("ser-she-o-rar-ee") seem reasonable to me (NYC area); I can't "visualize" a three-syllable pronunciation. – Jeff Zeitlin Dec 25 '19 at 15:38
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    This is really a question for the law stackexchange. The word in question is AFAIK only used as legal jargon, so it has no established pronunciation in general speech. And in the courtroom it might depend on local customs which pronunciation is acceptable. – The Photon Dec 25 '19 at 15:45
  • Agree with @JeffZeitlin ... 4 syllables, with "tio" pronounced as in "nation". – GEdgar Dec 25 '19 at 20:48
  • I cannot tell you how you will be perceived. Given the variety of pronunciation, introducing an even less familiar one seems a bit of an odd choice. Merging diphthongs into single syllables is common in many British and Southern US accents -- it might seem odd to do so in just this one word, but I suspect most people will not notice the incongruity in your speech. As you note, even in SCOTUS oral arguments many folks (justices and attorneys) simply say granted cert or cert petition, so unless I was talking about language (rather than law), I would simply say cert myself in casual speech. – Mike Graham Dec 25 '19 at 20:52
  • @JeffZeitlin - You could go to the link and click the little speaker icon. I wasn't able to link directly to it, unfortunately. – aparente001 Dec 25 '19 at 21:41
  • @tchrist - ditto. – aparente001 Dec 25 '19 at 21:41
  • @ThePhoton - We do have a tag here for legalese. – aparente001 Dec 25 '19 at 21:41
  • @MikeGraham - That's interesting. In the ABA Journal article, only two used the abbreviation. You've seen that most people just use the one-syllable abbreviation in conversation? You could contribute an Answer. – aparente001 Dec 25 '19 at 21:42
  • @MikeGraham It's impossible to merge a diphthong into a single syllable. That's because by definition a diphthong is already in a single syllable only: it's always tautosyllabic. A pair of adjacent vowels that stand in two separate syllables are in hiatus, just as in the original Latin: /ker.ti.o.ra.ri/ with dots for syllable breaks. You can fuse that into a diphthong by reducing /i/ to /j/ and have tetrasyllabic /ker.tjo.ra.ri/, but /tj/ isn't stable especially for English speakers, and so wouldn't long survive. Which is exactly what happened. – tchrist Dec 25 '19 at 21:53
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    @aparente001 I can't find any trisyllabic pronunciation in your link. – tchrist Dec 25 '19 at 22:00
  • @aparente001 IME, cert is ubiquitous. To take a couple examples from the most recent SCOTUS session: Justice Sotomayor and the attorneys for both sides used "cert" in https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2019/18-1109_2dp3.pdf and Justice Gorsuch and the petitioner's attorney used it in https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2019/18-1269_2d8f.pdf -- I suspect all the justices and every member of the SCOTUS bar use "cert" in casual conversation. The hosts of the podcast https://www.heritage.org/scotus-101 also use "cert". – Mike Graham Dec 25 '19 at 22:41
  • @aparente001 I cannot attest to the ways my relatively-rare conversations with other SCOTUS wonks have gone. My instinct is that "cert" or avoiding the word altogether are the norm. The only time I could imagine personally saying "certiorari" is if someone asked what I meant by "cert", and I'd probably intone "petition for writ of certiorari" the same way I would intone a term like "President Pro Tempore of the Senate" or "Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus" -- with a distance so that others know that it's some technical term only used in abbreviation. – Mike Graham Dec 25 '19 at 22:49
  • It should be noted that most folks in the US would not have the foggiest idea how to pronounce the word. – Hot Licks Dec 31 '19 at 00:32

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I would recommend pronouncing this word with at least four syllables.

When you talk in your question about a pronunciation with three syllables, you seem to be referring to an audio file linked from the Free Dictionary entry. I have never seen a written transcription of the pronunciation of certiorari that showed it as having three syllables.

I prefer to use transcriptions rather than audio files for pronunciation information: transcriptions leave less room for uncertainty and do a better job of indicating the important parts of a pronunciation but not the unimportant details.

Another reason not to use audio files (or to only use them as a supplement to written transcriptions) is that in some cases, they are just wrong. That seems to be the case here. This audio file, which sounds like it was automatically generated/artificially produced, seems to place the primary stress on the first syllable: to me, it sounds something like [ˈsəːʃəri] (rhyming with a certain pronunciation of tertiary). Perhaps whatever software was used to generate it based the pronunciation on the pattern of words ending in -ary (where American English speakers typically have a secondary stress on the -a(r)- while British English speakers leave the vowel corresponding to the letter a fully unstressed and may elide it).

That would be a mistake because certiorari does not end in -ary. In both American English and British English, the primary stress in the pronunciation of certiorari standardly falls on the -ra(r)- syllable, which obviously excludes the possibility of eliding this syllable. The preceding o would normally also correspond to a separate syllable (it's unlikely for the o to be elided because vowels are resistant to elision when they are immediately followed by a stressed syllable). Along with the initial cer(t)- and the final -(r)i, that adds up to at least four syllables. You may choose whether to use a fifth: since the medial -(t)i- is followed by an unstressed syllable, there is the option of eliding the i here.

herisson
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