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(jargon.info)Pronunciation Guide

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:How to Use the Lexicon:
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:Pronunciation Guide:
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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:

  1. 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).

  2. 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).

  3. 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.

  4. Vowels are represented as follows:

     /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 one that is often written with an upside-down `e').  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 consonents 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'!)