WordWacky

OK, so that last one doesn’t relate, but for those wondering, it’s a mild expletive of Norwegian origin, used quite a bit like one might use the terms, “Oy vey!” or “Jeez.”

The reason I’m grunting and groaning in my title is to represent the many ways one pronounces ough.

I started thinking about it because of this:

My wife and I have been looking for a place to transplant some bamboo, and we found this on Craigslist (sorry, no link — we may buy it yet). I got to thinking about the word trough, and its odd pronunciation of ough.

Depending on what brand of English you’re speaking, there are as many as fourteen different pronunciations for the morpheme, ough. Someone’s even made a sentence including them all, but all the sounds aren’t different in American English (we wouldn’t pronounce trough, “troth”):

Rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman John Gough strode through the streets of Loughborough; after falling into a slough on Coughlin road near the lough (dry due to drought), he coughed and hiccoughed, then checked his horse’s houghs and washed up in a trough.

Here are some other examples:

Uh - Poughkeepsie
Aw - Bought, brought, fought
Oh - Although, thorough
Off - Cough, trough
Uff - Enough, tough
Ooh - Through, slough
Ow - Bough, plough
Up - Hiccough

This quality of having so many possible pronunciations for one morpheme is notoriously frustrating for new English speakers, but can also be challenging for native speakers like me. In an English class my freshman year of college, I made some point that included the word, “antithesis,” which I pronounced as if my dear Greek Aunty, Thesis, were in town for a visit. Nobody but the professor appeared to notice. She smirked, which corrected me more loudly than if she’d spoken.

Although now, wrapped in my wrinkled crone cloak I say, “These things happen,” and slough off such embarrassments, in that classroom I became a heat source, a silent, spinning, radioactive lump of carbon, burning a hole through the seat of my chair.

Uff, da!