letter "a" in unstressed syllables

[Tom Zurinskas]

I ran the truespel database on words with "a" in them.
I scanned to find them in unstressed syllables
and related them to the sounds they portray below.

Note that these results are a true analysis
of the frequency of these sounds.  It represents
about 90% of the words on a typical text page.

Note: because truespel is spreadsheet friendly
analyses of letters/sounds can be done like this.



Words having letter "a" in unstressed syllable

Data are from the top 5k words in USA English
from the Collins Cobuild frequency data
of 15 million words in print (90% of words on a page)


Total words out of 5k with letter "a" in them     2,158

Ineligible words
words of one syllable    549
words where letter "a" is in stressed syllable    548
Words where letter "a" is in "ai"    52
Words where letter "a" is in "au"    21
Words where letter "a" is in "ay"    22
Words where letter "a" is in "ea"    252
Words where letter "a" is in "ai"    36
Words where letter "a" is in "ai"    3
Words where "a" is not pronounced    11

Total words with letter "a" ineligible    1,494

Sound, top word, instances, %

~u  about  317,344  45%
~ool  social  153,855  22%
~i important  130,214  18%
~a program  33,799  5%
~er forward  22,980  3%
~air necessary  19,094  3%
~au already  15,243  2%
~aa particular  7,621  1%
~ae separate  4,226  1%

Total   704,376  100%



Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
see truespel.com
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