Most Notable Quotations of 2010

[Tom Zurinskas]

Regarding the phonetic notation /ou/
The letter string "ou" spells the "long o" (oh) sound primarily in "ough" words.


Analysis of the sounds spelled by "ou" in USA English

Out of the top 5k words of USA English the letter string "ou" appears in 186 words.
There are 10 sounds/soundstrings spelled by "ou" in these 186 words.
Out of the 15.4M instances for the top 5k words, words with "ou" have 690k or 4.5%.

The sounds spelled by "ou" are ranked below.

  instances  words   most popular word
         %      %    tradspel ~truespel   comments
1 ~ou   34%     39%   out      ~out        53% are forms of "out" words
2 ~ue   24%     9%    you      ~yue        82% are from 5 "you" words
3 ~oo   16%     3%    would    ~wood       100% are from "ould" words
4 ~er   6%      5%    your     ~yer        92% are from "your" words
5 ~u    6%      11%   enough   ~innuf
6 ~i(s) 4%      18%   serious   ~seereeyis 100% are from ending "ous"
7 ~or   4%      7%    course   ~kors
8 ~oe   3%      3%    though   ~thoe       83% are from "ough" words
9 ~au   1%      3%    brought  ~braut      100% are from "ought" words
10 ~awwer 1%    1%    hours    ~aawerz     100% are from "hour"
11 ~ue+~ou 0%   1% throughout ~thhruewwout 100% from "throughout"
       100%    100%

Data on word frequency are from Collins Cobuild



Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
see truespel.com phonetic spelling





>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Joel S. Berson"
> Subject: Re: Most Notable Quotations of 2010
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 11/20/2010 10:29 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> >The nature and sequence of the vocalic phonemes, moreover, precisely echo /
> >ou i: ou /
> >the chant of the Wicked Witch's guards in _The Wizard of Oz_.
>
> Fred, if you list "Don't retreat! Reload!", I want to see this
> cited! (Thanks for the memory, Jon.)
>
> Joel
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org