Spelling/pronunciation of "gross" different from "moss","floss", "loss", "toss" etc

Question

I am puzzled by the spelling of "gross". I always heard it pronounced as a diphthong, and my dictionaries confirm this. Now my English teachers always taught me that while a repeated consonant in spelling can indicate several things (that the preceding vowel is short, or in a preterite form that the stress is on the preceding syllable), the preceding vowel is never a diphthong.

In fact, "gross" is the only exception that I know of to this rule.

Why is "gross" an exception and pronounced unlike "moss", "floss", "loss", "toss", etc.?

Answer 1

Beware of teachers who tell you that something is "never" true in English. Exceptions abound, particularly when it comes to pronunciation.

Perhaps the best example is wind, which can be pronounced with the short i heard in "win" and with the long i heard in "wide", depending on the meaning of the word in its context.

It's also interesting how pint does not rhyme with lint, hint, glint, or tint, in the same way that gross does not rhyme with boss, loss, toss, or cross.

As for the o in gross, you're right – that's not like the short o heard in "moss"; however, we could point out that it is like the long o heard in "most", though not like the short o heard in "cost".

If you stumble across a word you've never seen before (like phross, for example), you wouldn't know for sure if that rhymes with "gross" or "floss". All you can do is take an educated guess.

Answer 2

The irregular pronunciation of gross could be related to French pronunciation

The word "gross" comes from the French adjective gros, which is spelled with a double S in its feminine form grosse. I have the impression that in French itself, grosse has a somewhat "exceptional" pronunciation: rather than being pronounced with [ɔ], it is often pronounced with [o], which is a violation of the French "loi de position". (See post #52, by merquiades (Apr 30, 2014) in the following Word Reference thread: O-like vowels (RP English). Some modern French accents do have [ɔ] in grosse ("Combien d'accents en français? Focus sur la France, la Belgique et la Suisse").) I would guess that the French pronunciation of grosse with [o] is related to the English pronunciation with the GOAT vowel (i.e, the vowel phoneme found in the word "goat", also called the "long o" sound, transcribed in IPA as /əʊ/ for British English or as /oʊ/ or /o/ for American English).

Although I've only ever heard the word pronounced with the GOAT vowel, it seems that some English speakers use the LOT vowel (or perhaps the CLOTH vowel, in accents where CLOTH=THOUGHT) in the word gross. The pronunciation of gross with the LOT vowel appears to be associated with Scotland in particular. John Wells wrote a blog post "a gross violation?" (Monday, 22 June 2009) that says that the English journalist Simon Hoggart criticized the Scottish politician Gordon Brown for allegedly using a pronunciation like /grɒs/ (I haven't been able to find any audio samples that would allow me to confirm that this is a feature of Brown's pronunciation), and we find a comment below by The Blob5, June 2012 at 14:53, that says "Gross-like-floss is a common pronunciation among the older generations in Scotland." I also found another post, in the WordReference thread "dross: pronunciation", that says "In Scotland, there is a prevalent pronunciation of 'gross' to rhyme with 'loss'" (wandle, Jul 28, 2012 #10), and this pronunciation is mentioned in John Walker's Critical Pronunciation Dictionary of 1791:

This word is irregular from a vanity of imitating the French. In Scotland they pronounce this word regularly so as to rhyme with moss. Pope also rhymes it with this word.

"Shall only man be taken in the gross?
"Grant but as many forts of mind as moss."

This, however, must be looked upon as a poetical license; for the sound is now irrevocably fixed as it is marked, rhyming with jocose, verbose, &c.

Other words like gross?

The Wells blog post says that gross (and related words like engross) are the only words spelled with "oss" and pronounced with the GOAT vowel in a typical British English accent. The linked WordReference thread on dross indicates that at least a few American English speakers grew up pronouncing "dross" with the GOAT vowel, but it's unclear if this is anything more than just a sporadic mispronunciation used by people who saw the word in writing before hearing it and guessed at the pronunciation. (E.g. compare "OAR-y" for "awry" and "MIZZ-uld" for "misled", which are both attested as pronunciations used by some native speakers, but are definitely not considered correct in any accent.)

Other people have brought up cases of diphthongs before consonant clusters, like pint, but technically these are not an exception to the rule that you mentioned, which deals with a "repeated consonant in spelling". In "pint", no consonant letter is repeated.

In fact, there are very few true exceptions to the rule as you have stated it.

Words ending in "oll"

I only know of one major class of exceptions: words ending in "oll" like the word "poll" mentioned in Astralbee's answer. Some have the LOT vowel (or in many or all American English accents, the CLOTH/THOUGHT vowel), like doll, but most have the GOAT vowel, like roll, scroll, troll, stroll, poll, toll, droll.

Even these words may not necessarily be exceptions, because not all speakers pronounce the GOAT vowel as a closing diphthong in this context. Some speakers, like me, have an allophonic realization of the GOAT vowel in this context that sounds closer to [oɫ] or [oə̯ɫ] than to [oʊɫ]. (For example, I hear a difference between my pronunciation of slowly, which I would transcribe as [ˈsloʊli], and my pronunciation of holy, which I would transcribe as [hoɫi] or [hoə̯ɫi]. I pronounce the vowel in words like scroll like the vowel in the word holy, not like the vowel in the word slowly.)

Alternatively, in certain accents, the distinction between the GOAT vowel and some other back vowel phoneme may be reduced or eliminated by phenomena like l-vocalization, or mergers of certain vowels preceding /l/—the Wikipedia article on "English-language vowel changes before historic /l/" mentions some relevant mergers that occur for some speakers.

Bass in the sense "low" (not the fish)

Another freak exception like gross is the word bass in the sense "deep/low in the musical scale" (the explanation for that is given in the answer to the following EL&U question: Why does “bass” sound like “base”?).

I don't know of any other exceptions beyond these, as long as we're talking about the pronunciation of single vowel letters rather than digraphs, and restricting the discussion to stressed vowels.

Vowel digraphs before double consonants (uncommon)

Vowel digraphs occur fairly infrequently before double consonants, but when they do, it's not unlikely that the word is pronounced with a diphthong (if the vowel is stressed): e.g. the word surveillance has a "long a" sound in the stressed second syllable, and when renaissance is pronounced with stress on the second syllable, that syllable has a "long a" sound (in American English, it can be pronounced with stress on the first, in which case the second syllable has a reduced vowel sound).

Unstressed vowels in some words (not worth learning as an exception)

Vowels in pre-tonic word-initial syllables are sometimes pronounced as "long", even when there is a following double consonant, but this is never necessary and in some cases I have the impression that it can even be stigmatized (specifically, I think I've seen criticism of the pronunciation of the word dissect with a "long i" in the first syllable) so I wouldn't recommend trying to learn these words as a class of exceptions. I just thought I should mention them for completeness. This phenomenon can occur with the letter "o", as in "official", or "e", as in "effective". More commonly, "official" and "effective" are pronounced with reduced vowels in their first syllables.

Answer 3

You are right, the vowel 'o' in "gross" is pronounced as the diphthong oʊ, the same as in "toast". It is not, for example, pronounced the same way as the similarly spelled "dross".

However it is not the only example of this preceding a repeated consonant. "Poll" for example.

Answer 4

English has a logical model of "short" and "long" vowels - in this model, the "long vowels" a, i, o and u are considered a single "unit" of sound, even though when they are pronounced they are obviously diphthongs.

The ou in cloud is a diphthong - and you won't get any argument from anyone on that. Something like bow (as in archery) might not be considered a diphthong - as the long "o" is what's being sounded here.

Being a native speaker myself, I didn't realize English has the "ʊ" sound as part of the "long o" until studying Spanish, which is a language that doesn't do that.

Interestingly, for verbs, double consonants tend to make the preceding vowel short. This explains the patterns when adding -ed or -ing to verbs, which is the typical situation that you are doubling consonants.

I think what is happening with gross is that two s's together indicate that the s sound at the end must be unvoiced. Plurals that end with a single s may have that sound voiced (like a "z") or unvoiced. Double "s" at the end of the word is always unvoiced.

Answer 5

The vowel sound of o in gross may be listened to in British and American English here: gross

The IPA phonetic transcription of the sound of the o in gross is əʊ in BrE and oʊ in AmE.

This vowel sound is called a diphthong but personally, I find it can confuse students. I think it's best to learn the actual sound in sample words first by contrasting minimal pairs of sounds (bed/bit, about/abate, etc.).

There are books out there that give you the sound using the IPA system and then give examples of words with that particular sound.

There are basically eight diphthongs in English:

You can see them here: English diphthongs and the author provides a list of words in which they are used. A useful tool.

The words in which they are used are NOT always pronounced the same in British and American English, though these diphthongs they exist in both varieties.

Other words that have the sound əʊ are: blow, no, grow and phone.

The sound is almost always spelled as an o except in a borrowing like flambeau, where the French eau is əʊ in English. That unfortunately is not true of other diphthongs (two vowels as one ) in English.

This can become quite complicated as the sound of ea in bead is the same as the ee in sheep. Therefore, if one starts with sounds and then one looks at lists of words with those sounds, one can start associating them with certain patterns, which I will not discuss here now.

Answer 6

Checking a regex dictionary for .*oss$ (i.e. all words ending "--oss" suggests that gross is indeed that only exception with o.

However looking at .*ass$ gives three vowel sounds (by example):

• mass /mæs/ is the most common.
• grass /ɡrɑːs/ (a long sound, like in fast), though some accents would have /græs/
• bass, /beɪs/ in music (a different long sound, clearly a dipthong, the same as base); the fish is /bæs/.

So the "rule" is clearly oversimplified