Jane in Billings, Montana, says her daughter is a veterinary student who pronounces the word experiment as ecks-PEER-a-ment rather than ex-PARE-a-ment. By their early teens, children tend to get their language from peers, rather than their parents or books. The word experiment has about half a dozen different common pronunciations, and two major ones. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pronunciation of “Experiment””
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Jane McCarthy.
Where are you calling from, Jane?
Big Sky, Montana.
Oh, Big Sky. That sounds like a place I want to go.
It’s gorgeous. We love it.
Oh, nice. Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?
We have a daughter who is studying veterinary medicine. And so she goes into the lab and she says, I have to do an experiment today. And I say, Bridget, isn’t it experiment? And she said, no, it’s experiment. And my husband and I both called them experiments. So I’m just wondering where she got this. And our cohorts do the same thing.
So your daughter says, I’m going to exaggerate it here for a fact. Your daughter says experiment, and you say experiment.
Correct.
Okay, yeah. Where did she get it from?
Well, that’s the way that it goes pretty much for all kids. Around the ages of 10 to 13, they start shifting, and their influences become far more their friends and their cohort at school or after school activities, that sort of thing, and far less of their parents. So where they do continue to pick things up for their parents tends to be vocabulary, but not vowels or pronunciation, things like that.
Interesting.
Yeah, so I’m sure if they’re talking about it in class all day, the teacher’s talking about it, the students are talking about it.
Yeah.
Yes. And what’s really interesting about this pronunciation of experiment is that it has been excoriated by some language mavens over the years. But generally, it’s always been present, as far as we know, in American English. You can find mentions of it as far back as the mid-1800s, where it’s usually put in the mouths of uneducated rubes or foreigners speaking English. But it has always been here. And the thing is, there’s something like six different common pronunciations of the word in American English today and two major ones. So it’s not a surprise that you differ because you come from different generations.
Well, I’ll have to watch and see if I can get her some more vocabulary.
You could settle on a third pronunciation, which is experiment.
Or a fourth one, trial.
Yeah, just call it trial.
Yes. And my husband calls it spearmint.
Spearmint.
Spearmint, yeah. Like the gum.
Yeah, just being silly.
All right. Cool. Thanks for calling, Jane. We really appreciate it.
Well, thank you. It was fun. Take care.
Bye-bye.
Take care.
Bye.
Bye, Jane.
So one of the ways the pronunciations of experiment differ is that first syllable. So some people it’s experiment, and some people it’s experiment, and some people it’s experiment.
Experiment.
Wow.
Yeah, it’s interesting, right? So some people kind of skip the K sound. They say experiment, which is kind of more of a childish pronunciation. But they’re out there, and you can find them chronicled and recorded, and the linguists are looking at them and trying to figure out if there’s patterns there.
Oh, that’s interesting.
Yeah. And I’m sure if you’re saying it a whole lot because that’s your work.
Yeah, and you’re going to say it like your peers, the people who are doing the same studies that you’re doing.
Absolutely.
