GEnome or geNOME

[Donald M. Lance]

I listened for pronunciations during an afternoon CNN piece.  Only Myron Kandel (however he spells his name) said geNOM.  All the others said what seems natural to me -- GEnom.  In addition to AHD, Webster's 10th, the Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide, and the Cambridge International Dictionary of English all have GEnom.  Kandel seems at times to be rather fussy about his pronunciations, and people like that occasionally apply Romance stress rules rather than Germanic stress rules -- I assume on the assumption that they are being more sophisticated.  But they use initial stress on
HARra(s)sment.

Herb Stahlke wrote:

> This morning I heard Carl Kassel, reporting on the nearly completed mapping of the human genome, stress the ultima.  In other reports and interviews I've heard both pronunciations, from both reporters and researchers.  I checked the AHD, the only dictionary I have that's recent enough to list the word, and it gives only penultimate stress, although it does list a second spelling without the final -e and pronounced with a short <o>.  Where is the final-stressed pronunciation coming from?  I can imagine explanations, like an ersatz-French hypercorrection, but none of them sounds particularly likely.
>
> Herb Stahlke
> Ball State University