Pronouncing “Exactly”

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. My name’s Ian Neal. I’m a local from San Diego, and I got a question about pronunciation of a word.

Excellent, Ian. Let’s hear it.

My wife always ribs me for pronouncing the word E-X-A-C-T-L-Y exactly with pronunciation on the T. She says that it should be exactly, and so every time I say exactly, she gives me this glare from across the room. And it’s become a running joke in our family. So I figured I’d call in and put the debate to bed once and for all. Are you supposed to be exact when you say exactly, or should it be exactly?

Where did you pick that up, Ian?

I’ve just always said it that way.

And where’d you grow up?

I grew up in San Diego.

Okay. What does your wife say?

My wife says exactly.

Right, exactly. With a K sound.

Is she a San Diegan, too?

She is, yes.

Okay. But she’s more worldly than I am. She did a Fulbright in Turkey for a few years and has done a lot of study abroad stuff.

Okay, so a house divided in San Diego.

Exactly. And she’s in the Department of Linguistics at SDSU, so she’s very firm.

All right, then. Well, then. So when she glares at you across the room, it’s with degrees on the wall behind her.

Indeed. So exactly versus exactly.

Mm— You’re both right. Thanks for calling.

That’s what I figured. Look, there’s two common pronunciations that are this word throughout the English-speaking world, no matter where English is spoken, and in your household, they both exist. Exactly with a T and exactly without the T sound.

If you look in dictionaries, which have done a thorough job, depending on the dictionary, but most common dictionaries have done a lot of research on this sort of thing or talked to experts, you will find that some dictionaries include both pronunciations, and some only include the T pronunciation.

So if we’re actually looking at dictionaries, more dictionaries agree with you than agree with your wife.

Interesting.

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that you’re more correct. Oxford dictionaries, Merriam-Webster dictionaries, and Macmillan dictionaries are the ones that include both pronunciations. And I think they more accurately reflect the state of the language when it comes to the word exactly.

And actually, now that I’m self-conscious about it, I don’t even really know what I say when I’m not thinking about it. Martha, you’re going to have to tell me later.

I say exactly.

Exactly.

But I have a friend who says exactly.

Exactly.

And it sounds so exact.

It sounds exact, yeah.

Yeah. And it’s fine. And there’s not a British-American split. It’s not educated versus uneducated. It’s just simply the tradition that you come from. It’s just the way that you learned the word.

Yeah. Very interesting. And I can tell you one more thing. The reason that T disappears for a lot of speakers, like your wife, is because that K and T sound next to each other, the consonant clusters tend to reduce to one consonant sound. And she will understand that as a professor of linguistics.

Excellent. Well, thank you for clarifying those for me.

Okay, cool. Appreciate it.

All right. Take care, Ian.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Now I’m thinking of et cetera, too.

Et cetera. That’s a great one. A lot of people say et cetera.

Right, yeah, because that T, that T, S sound there together, your mouth wants to do some simplifying with it. You’ll find that happens again and again and again.

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