Where to Put the Stress on the Word “Grimace”?

Grant, you remember our conversation about how to pronounce the word spelled A-I-O-L-I?

Yeah, that’s the garlicky mayonnaise.

Right. That you didn’t pronounce, but yeah, I pronounce it aioli.

Aioli. A lot of people say it that way.

Yeah. Well, that conversation reminded Vern Correa of San Diego about one that he had with a friend back in graduate school.

He wrote to us and said, I rendered the word spelled G-R-I-M-A-C-E as grimace, bringing derisive laughter from my friend.

And it didn’t end there. He proceeded to repeat the story over several days until a schoolteacher friend looked up the word in her dictionary.

That dictionary listed grimace, and grimace wasn’t cited in the entry.

And Grant, I had no idea that you could pronounce it either of two ways.

So grimace with the stress on the second syllable.

Mm—

You know what makes it more difficult in the modern age is that when we look up pronunciations online,

We kind of just accept any old pronunciation.

But a lot of dictionaries indicate the stress on syllables with a straight up and down tick mark.

It’s kind of like an apostrophe without the curve.

But some dictionaries put the tick mark before the stressed syllable,

And some put it after the stressed syllable.

And if you’re not paying attention,

You might not know which dictionary pronunciation you’re looking at.

So you might not really be clear what syllable is supposed to be stressed.

So that’s why you need the audio files.

Just play the audio.

Yeah, well, that’s what I did.

And I saw in the Oxford English Dictionary that in British English,

You say grimace, which really surprised me.

I did not know that.

You would think that they could become consistent, that dictionaries would be consistent about that tick mark.

There are so many dictionary traditions.

Some of them have been around for hundreds of years, and it’s hard for them to break their molds.

But I do want to say you could do what we do in my house.

That is one of the words that we intentionally mispronounce.

So we say grimace, like it’s Italian.

Grimace.

Or instead of saying no dice, meaning no luck or no chance, we say no dice.

Oh, that’s nice.

But you’ll have lots of dice, lots of luck if you give us a call with your mispronunciations, 877-929-9673.