John Wells’s phonetic blog

Have a look at the second of these “word picture” puzzles in yesterday’s London Lite . It consists of the words RELIGIOUS TOME perforated wi...

I don’t know when or why one lost its weak form /ən/ in standard accents. It remains, with the spelling ’un , as a dialectal or jocular for...

Sili (24 October) mentioned the rivalry between “boxed set” and “box set” or “boxset”. A favourite example of this phenomenon that I used to...

Until now, a url has had to consist only of ASCII characters (and not even all of them are allowed). According to reports in the press , thi...

As we know, English [ʃ] can be spelt not only sh but also in a number of other ways, as seen in the examples ocean, machine, precious, suga...

An SMS, a short message that you send or receive using your mobile phone (AmE cellphone) is generally known as a text . This word is also us...

In the male-voice choir I belong to we warm up thoroughly at the start of every rehearsal. This involves body mobilization like the exercis...