129
I think the word you want is conveyance. It's pronounced something like kun-VAY-unss and means "a method or way of being transported".
It is a valid English word, but it's slightly obscure and stilted-sounding for what you want to say, which may also be why people have trouble understanding it. I'm American, not British, but I would be more likely to say "...
110
Because so-called long vowels (a, e, i, o, and u, when pronounced "like their letter name") and digraphs do not require a doubled consonant to form the participle.
Compare hating or waiting with batting, for example. Or plan and plane, which become, respectively, planning and planing.
102
Originally, everyone spelled it centre, but because of Noah Webster's spelling reforms, people in the US started spelling it center, particularly in the last century. Although the revised spelling center has been adopted internationally to varying extents, centre is still more popular in most regions. But regardless of how you spell it, it's the same word, ...
81
TL;DR
Your friend is incorrect. It's not *tpelf with p, but tƿelf with ƿ—Wynn—which was the Old English (OE) letter to represent the phoneme /w/.
So twelve was tƿelf 1. Twenty was tƿēntiȝ 2. Two was tƿā 3.
Historical prelude to W
The letter that looks like a P is actually:
Ƿ (ƿ)
It's called Wynn which was a runic letter in Old English alphabet for the ...
68
𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅
The pronunciation of 'iron' in standard varieties of English is EYE-URN (BrE: /'aɪən/, AmE: /'aɪrn/) and not EYE-RUN (which is also a common pronunciation of 'iron' in some varieties of English) because of a very common process called Metathesis. It's defined as the transposition/rearrangement of letters, syllables or phonemes (sounds) in a word.
𝐸...
62
The English language has no universal rule for when to double a consonant
before the suffix "-ing".
As evidence that there is no universal rule,
consider the word "travel." It ends consonant-vowel-consonant,
but both the forms "travelling" and "traveling" are widely used.
Writers of US English usually write "traveling"
(but sometimes write "travelling"), ...
61
You are confusing "Sever" with "Severe"
Severe is definitely used as an adjective. It means:
very great; intense.
While, sever is a verb which means:
divide by cutting or slicing, especially suddenly and forcibly.
put an end to (a connection or relationship); break off.
In your quote, the word "sever" is used in the Past ...
58
By analogy with words you already know. In more detail, you guess mainly by recognizing morphemes, taking into account the three main spelling systems that exist within English and taking into account common phonetic pressures that alter pronunciations. Educated guessing cannot be reduced to rules, of course, but I can give you a feel for it with a ...
57
𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅
The W in 'two' and 'sword' is silent because of a sound change that took place somewhere between Old & Middle English. The change applied to words in which the W was preceded by [s, t] and followed by a back vowel [ɒ ɔ o ɑ u] etc.
'Swore' and 'sworn' also lost their W's at one point, but were later on restored by analogy with swear.
𝐸𝑥𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑛...
55
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 ...
50
We form the plurals of regular nouns ending in the sound /s/ by adding the sound /ɪz/ to the word. So for the word bus, /bʌs/, we get the plural form /bʌsɪz/. In writing we represent this with the written suffix -ES. So we write the plural form of bus as buses.
Words that end with the written letter X usually end with an /s/ sound. The word box, for ...
answered May 17 '16 at 8:39
Araucaria - Not here any more.
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49
Good question.
There are two words! If you say 'log in' it is generally a verb. On the other hand, if you say 'login' it generally means a noun.
WordWeb describes this -
log in (v) - Enter a computer. login (noun) - A combination of a user's identification and password used to enter a computer, program, network, etc.
So, in your case, you probably ...
46
I assume you mean conveyance, which OALD defines as
[uncountable] (formal) the process of taking somebody/something from one place to another
[countable] (formal) a vehicle
The formal tag indicates that while educated people might know the word, even they might not use in day-to-day conversation.
I am not familiar with how the term is used in ...
43
"Ph" is most commonly used in words that come from Greek, like "philosophy". The Greek letter that makes the "F" sound is "phi", written like φ.
As for "Gh", most of the words containing it come from German and old English. It was pronounced then as "ch" is in German today - as a rasp in the back of the throat, like the "ch" in "Loch Ness". Nobody really ...
42
I believe the symbol is known as a tilde
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilde
The Punctuation Guide is a good source of information for English punctuation and its usage, including what each symbol is called (though in this case it doesn't mention the tilde).
Typing the actual symbol into Google or Wikipedia also yields an accurate result.
[edit]
If ...
41
The usual mnemonic in English to remember the ruling for this is represented by a fairly simple poem:
i before e,
Except after c,
Or when sounded as "a,"
As in neighbour and weigh.
Of course, as with any rule there are some exceptions: the most notable ones are either, neither, inveigle and seize. Unfortunately there isn't a cast-iron procedure for ...
41
While these are three unrelated words, they share some characteristics: all are produced by modifying existing words in particular ways that are fairly standard.
You're right that a documenter would be one who documents; in general, adding "-r" or "-er" to a verb very often means someone who often does that verb. Your automated spell-checker doesn't have ...
40
I asked some native friends the same thing, and they told me their guesses are based on similar words. It is far from perfect (moon - door anyone?), but it is a start.
Also, the origin of the word may help. Charade is French, a mostly phonemic (that is, a letter or group of letters have the same sound no matter wher they are) language; in French ch is ...
38
"US." is wrong.
Initialisms are either written with full-stops (periods) between every letter or not at all:
The U.S.A.
The USA
Shortenings are are abbreviations in which the end of the word has been dropped. These are written with one full stop at the end:
Approx. (approximately)
Esp. (especially)
I can see why you would think "the US" is an ...
37
English is an "analytic" language: "a language that conveys grammatical relationships without using inflectional morphemes".
Hence, the morphological forms for "The forest was dark" and "She walked in the forest" are just "forest", and you would be hard put finding a check word with the same "forest" root if you wanted to ascertain what vowel letter should ...
34
We guess. And we frequently guess wrong.
Your last sentence provides an excellent example: I know how to pronounce bomb, comb and tomb, but presented with a made up word like domb or fomb, I would have no idea which of those three words it should rhyme with.
With ch, the best rule I can come up with is, "Does this word look a bit French?"
Words that ...
34
Short answer:
The p does not get doubled in 'hope' because it's followed by the silent/ magic e. It's called magic e because it's silent itself, but it often changes the pronunciation of the preceding syllable. It turns a vowel to a diphthong or a long vowel. The only common exceptions are words that end in ‹ve› (e.g. love, have).
Examples:
Hat (/hæt/) + e -...
30
The word eating "eat" is "vowel + vowel + consonant". It is not "consonant + vowel + consonant", therefore rule 2 does not apply.
Only the general rule of "just add -ING" applies.
to sleep => sleeping
to eat => eating
28
There isn't a relatively simple explanation, I'm afraid. As you've pointed out, there are more exceptions-to-rules than than there are rules; however, there are some general guidelines that might help you:
before double consonants
before double consonants, 'i' is usually short regardless of its position in a word: as in bitten, hidden, miffed, bigger, piggy,...
26
Centre is correct in international and British English.
Center is an alternative spelling used mainly in American English.
The meaning is the same.
25
Assumption is directly derived from Latin assumptionem which does have a P, so it also has a P. Assume on the other hand is derived from Latin assumere, which didn't have a P.
Other similar examples include presume/presumption and consume/consumption
Edit*
Articulatory reasons for the P
The epenthetic P is probably inserted for articulatory reasons.
...
25
TL;DR
The reason why the ⟨th⟩ in posthumous is pronounced /t͡ʃ/ (ch) is the coalescence/assimilation1 of the t and the following u.
Explanation
'Posthumous' is made up of the prefix post- and humous. Post ends in a /t/ and the ⟨h⟩ in humous is silent so it starts with a u which is basically /juː/ (the same as the u in 'cue'). We could say that humous starts ...
22
There's a long discussion of this point in the Talk section of Wikipedia. The upshot seems to be that the official Dutch convention (the painter was a native of the Netherlands) requires a separate prefix ("tussenvoegsel") on a surname, such as van or de, to be lowercased when it is preceded by the forename or initial but capitalized when it is not.
These ...
22
You have four examples due to how the words are being used differently in each case.
The noun phrase “brute force” describes the raw strength used to achieve or get through something. For example: "Greg used brute force to open the stuck door."
Below is an explanation of the different formats you found. I have also linked to an article about hyphens and ...
21
𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅
'Lose' came from Old English (OE) word losian while 'loose' was taken from Old Norse around the thirteenth century. There was a process in OE through which s, f and th became voiced respectively to [z], [v] and [ð] when they occurred between voiced sounds i.e. between two vowels or a vowel and anther voiced sound. There was no phonemic contrast of ...
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