Pronouncing “Leicester”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Sean in Asheville, North Carolina.

Hi, Sean.

My girlfriend and I were having a conversation the other evening about the name of a town and a prominent road here near us in Asheville.

And the name of that town is spelled L-E-I-C-E-S-T-E-R.

And I was just calling to see if there was, A, an objectively correct way to pronounce this word, and, B, if there is, why do we pronounce it so many different ways?

So the town is L-E-I-C-E-S-T-E-R, and you have avoided saying it on purpose.

Correct.

Yeah, I don’t want to influence the decision.

And you want to know if there’s an unassailably correct way to say that word.

Yes.

All right, I’ve got 900 answers.

I’ll give you the first.

All right.

Sit down.

That’s what I expected.

The first thing is when we talk about place names, the answer is no.

There’s no one way that all the different places that are called that same thing, there’s no rule on that.

We’ve talked numerous times on the show about how people can’t pronounce Versailles as Versailles and Paris as Paris and just a ton of different place names that are Charlotte or Charlotte and just different.

So the first answer is, how do the people in North Carolina say it?

That’s the correct way for that particular town and that particular place.

What do they say?

Okay.

So we, this is part of the argument, is that we have both heard it both ways multiple times from multiple different sources.

So you’ve heard it as Leicester and as what?

Leicester and also, to throw another one in there, as Leicester.

Leicester.

A combination of the two.

Yeah.

Oh, my goodness.

And how old is this town?

A couple hundred years?

Probably.

I’m assuming as old roughly as Asheville is.

Yeah, yeah.

I don’t know about that.

That sounds about right.

So this is part of a family of place names that we Americans have borrowed from the British.

And there’s a bunch of them.

They all end in C-E-S-T-E-R.

And they all have this strangely compressed pronunciation where the word is long, but the way we say it is short.

And it’s confusing because Americans tend not to do this in American English.

There’s a couple different things happening here, and I’ll get to these other place names in a second.

One is vowel reduction, where different vowel sounds kind of blob together to form one vowel sound.

And the other one is called haplology, which is a fun word, which means when two sounds appear in a word next to each other and they’re very similar, they tend to reduce to just one sound.

So a word that’s spelled L-E-I-C-E-S-T-R did used to be pronounced something more like Leicester.

But there were three syllables, and now it tends to be two, okay?

Because the two syllables that sound roughly the same, the E-I-C and the E-S-T, combine to make one sound.

Whether it’s Leicester or Leicester is up to you.

And even in the United Kingdom, by the way, although most people say Leicester, you will hear Leicester, and you will hear longer forms of it as well, just depending how far deep in the countryside you are.

So other place names, you probably, everyone’s thinking of Worcester, right?

It looks like Worcester.

Everyone’s thinking of probably Gloucester, which looks like Gloucester.

People might be thinking of Limster, which looks like Leominster.

And there’s a bunch of other ones.

And so we’ve inherited, for the most part, those pronunciations from the United Kingdom.

And again, they haven’t always been like that.

All of these place names, by the way, used to be two words.

That cester comes from a Latin word meaning camp.

And all of them seem to come from places that many years ago when the Romans were in the British Isles, they had a camp.

And so it would be a name of a place plus camp or the name of a person plus camp.

Winchester.

Yes.

Same root.

Yeah, Winchester.

Very good.

So they’ve all reduced down.

And place names are their own special kind of abbreviation and contraction of language because they tend to be old.

They tend to be said a lot.

And when something is old and said a lot, it tends to simplify.

Okay.

Well, that’s perfect.

I think that was what I was expecting the answer to be is that there’s no definite answer.

And it just sort of came to be how it was.

So if you really want to get to the heart of this, go down to where the old men hang out in front of the barbershop or the old women hang out in front of the beauty salon or the bench outside the courthouse or whatever the equivalent is there in Lester, Leicester, and ask them.

Talk to the folks who have been there for 50, 60, 70, 80 years, and that’s probably your best bet.

All right.

Well, that sounds great.

Thank you guys so much.

Thanks for calling, Sean.

We appreciate it.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.