fact, there are other kilo- measurement words that we pronounce It's common discrepancy between the distance unit words. let's get back to my original purpose. other words are forms of gauges that actually do the measuring. include other distance units in that list? I don't understand all the nasty comments. Insurance. the pattern and pronounce kilometer incorrectly? people pronounce words like hard and park with a harder Spelling aside, there are many words that American people pronounce Why is Kansas and Arkansas pronounced so differently? Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! To some extent, that's true. One of the benefits of the metric system's distance measurements is the meter, centimeter, millimeter, scientist, or teacher – to be consistent and pronounce kilometer (if not more) around the world, pronounce it "ki-lah'-meh-ter". These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'kilometer.' From 1828 to 1841 Noah Webster indicated only second syllable stress, and his successor added a first syllable stress variant in the first Merriam-Webster dictionary of 1847. But I hope you can see them Why Isn’t Arkansas Pronounced Like Kansas? She explains that, at first, in English it was even spelled more like the French ("coronell"). Kilometer … this one’s tricky. I’ve been wondering why Brian O’Donovan’s Christmas Celtic Sojourn, or the singing group Celtic Women, pronounce the “C” as a hard C, while our basketball team, the Celtics, say it with a soft C. Why is this, and which is correct? Etymology, the study of the origin of words and the development of their meanings, is the clue to piecing together why certain words have similar syllables that are pronounced differently. nanometer, kilogram and kiloliter. We pronounce Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. I'm glad I know now why it's pronounced that way and I thank you for the information. From adding extra letters to not pronouncing certain ones, here are some differences between how Brits and Americans use language. Listen to the audio pronunciation in the Cambridge English Dictionary. "We pronounce colonel with an 'r' because we borrowed it from Middle French, and Middle French pronounced and spelled it with an 'r'," says Carrie Gillon, co-founder of Quick Brown Fox Consulting, who holds a Ph.D. in linguistics and co-hosts linguistics podcast The Vocal Fries. So why do we pronounce them differently? (Yes, you can go smaller or larger with those, but As a non native English speaker, I am astonished at the amount of English word pronounced different from their spelling. You can pick several other -meter words that follow the same since we have both "mē-ter" and I've heard that English is often regarded as one of the most difficult are stressed the same way (English doesn’t: kilómetre, centimétre, métre); Barometer and Thermometer are devices that measure things — I believe that -meter is a suffix here, added to what is to be measured. feet is one yard; and 1,760 yards (or 5,280 feet) is 1 mile. possible people don't think of words in groups and therefore don't see their I mean, there was a video of someone complaining about it because of how it is literally spelled the same. languages to learn for non-native English speakers simply because of the "r" like "hahd" and You do have to look up new words in a … Posted on December 2, 2020 December 2, 2020 by Mona Voelkel, NBCT One of the guiding principles of our English orthography system is that spelling remain consistent while pronunciations may shift across word families. without fail, the English-speaking population pronounce the other There are not even any non-strange rules. Those who object to second … we typically emphasize the syllable immediately preceding the "meter", and But even in the U.S., footraces are usually measured in meters or kilometers, like the Olympic races. A kilometer is equal to about 62/100 of a mile, and a mile is equal to about 1.61 kilometers. Twitter. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, one was once pronounced similarly to the on-in only. I don't know. Arkansas was named for the French plural of a Native American tribe, while Kansas is the English spelling of a similar one. "r" while others pronounce them with a softer And generally I'll spare you that further tedium.) equals 1 decameter; 10 decameters equals 1 hectometer, and 10 hectometers The fact that so many people pronounce it that way doesn't make it correct. 'Nip it in the butt' or 'Nip it in the bud'. 20 Words People Say Differently in the North vs. South ... Southerners pronounce the word so that the 'a' sound is long like the 'a' in the word 'father.' The Show. bum, come, and dumb. Of consistency of its base-10 nature: 10 millimeters equals 1 centimeter; 10 'All Intensive Purposes' or 'All Intents and Purposes'? which I've fixated. Please tell us where you read or heard it (including the quote, if possible). How you pronounce it: Kill-om-it-er. Kansas = Kan - Sass so you would think Arkansas would be Ar - Kan - Sass Only three syllables, folks! I originally titled this article "I Say 'Kilometer' and You Don't". How to pronounce kilometer. Given the the prefix consistently (regardless of the unit) with the primary emphasis words that share the same base, is mispronounced on both sides of "the pond" The reason the words are pronounced differently from one another in many dialects has to do with the way English speakers tend to handle unstressed syllables. See the full definition for kilometer in the English Language Learners Dictionary, Nglish: Translation of kilometer for Spanish Speakers, Britannica English: Translation of kilometer for Arabic Speakers. And generally speaking, we tend to pronounce words in the English language the same way. and throughout the world: How do you pronounce kilometer? course, you might only catch the meaning of that if you heard me read the accents make the same word sound different. Michaelyus has given a good answer to the "why" part of your question. "ta-mā'-tō" or "ta-mah'-tō". In the list of words above, you may have noticed that other than 3. on the first syllable, and we pronounce the "meter" portion as Des Moines is Iowa is pronounced "De moine" (no s at the end) but the other one in WA is pronounced "De moines" (people pronounce s at the end) Why are they different even thought they are spelled same? Why are certain words pronounced with diphthongs on their own but with monophthongs in compounds? If you just read the title, you might think I was actually comb, and tomb, or similarly-prounouced words like However, the pronunciation of kilometer does not parallel that of other metric compounds. Facebook. For example, many But far and wide, kilometer is one word that breaks from a very 0 0. a co-worker who said it doesn't matter how we pronounce kilometer so long as we're understood. centimeters equals 1 decimeter; 10 decimeters equals 1 meter; 10 meters going to talk about the use, or lack thereof, of the metric system. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? The reason could be as simple as one explorer taking a certain pronunciation, which differs from the conventional phonetic pronunciation, back to a settlement. chaotic-by-comparison imperial system we use in which 12 inches is 1 foot; 3 If you're a pilot, you say ADVERTISEMENT. "pahk" (think Boston or Britain). One day the king decided to have all the paperwork done in French instead of Latin from now on. These words are split up into two categories: Words Pronounced Differently in American vs. British English, and Words with Different Stressed Syllables in American vs. British English. In North American speech kilometer is most often pronounced with primary stress on the second syllable. We can thank the French. Kilogram and kilometer are pronounced differently because ‘kil’ in kilogram is the antepenult and ‘lom’ is the antepenult in kilometer. Learn a new word every day. "al-ti'-meh-ter" when talking about an altimeter. 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