How do you pronounce the word aunt? In most of the United States, it’s pronounced to sound just like the word ant. This is part of a complete episode.
Throwing cheese and shaky cheese are two very different things. In baseball, hard cheese refers to a powerful fastball, and probably comes from a similar-sounding word in Farsi, Urdu, and Hindi. Shaky cheese, on the other hand, is the grated...
How do you pronounce Missouri? Is it /miz-URR-ee/ or /miz-URR-uh/? There are actually four distinct pronunciations of this word. Linguist Donald Lance of the University of Missouri-Columbia studied the history of this name extensively and found that...
Marianne from Valdosta, Georgia, is stumped about how to pronounce the term bona fides. It means “authentic credentials,” as in literary bona fides, and comes from Latin bona fides, literally “good faith.” In the United...
Why do some people pronounce the word sandwich as “SANG-witch”? It’s common among first-generation Italian and Spanish speakers trying to approximate that N-D-W combination of sounds, which don’t exist in their native...
Lily in Iowa City, Iowa, says she and her roommate differ about how to pronounce the word hammock. Is it HAM-mock or HAM-mick? This is part of a complete episode.