Name: Is 'ough' the Trickiest Sound in English? | English Spelling & Prounciation Lesson
Uploaded: 2021-09-20T16:45:05.000Z
Duration: 5 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

Hi. Look, I'm really sorry about this, but as you probably know,

the way we spell things in English is not always the way we say them.

Take these four letters, for example, o u g h.

How do we pronounce them? Well, it all depends.

But put a 't' at the beginning and it's 'tough'.

But now let's add one more letter to make 'though'.

Again, one more letter, r, makes 'through'.

  Let's add another letter, o, we have thorough.

actually that's it. We can't extend any further with just one letter.

  the same letters pronounced five different ways.

Depending on what part of the English speaking world you come from,

there are around 11 different ways of pronouncing o u g h.

Well, a long time ago, the way we spelt things wasn't really fixed.

So people wrote things down the way they thought they sounded.

Gradually over time, the spellings became fixed,

particularly after the printing press was invented in the 15th century.

Unfortunately, although spellings were fixed,

something called The Great Vowel Shift was happening.

This was a period of about two hundred years

when for a number of reasons, the way we pronounced vowels in English

There aren't actually that many o u g h  words anyway,

and most of those are quite common. So you may already know them.

Are there any rules if you come across a word you don't know?

Well, some guidelines, but not really rules.

If a word ends in o u g h t  then it is more than likely pronounced [awt]:

thought, bought, brought, fought, ought, nought, sought.

If it's two syllables and ends in o u g h,

Other than that, the best way of finding out the pronunciation

is to use a dictionary because with 11 different possibilities,

you might guess the right one, but the odds are not great.

For example, and this is completely true, when researching this topic,

I came across an English word I hadn't seen before. S o u g h.

It's a verb which means to make a soft whistling sound

Was it sough like dough, sough like cough, sough like rough,

sough like plough, sough like through, sough like hiccough?

Annoyingly it can actually be pronounced two different ways,

If you want to know the correct way, you'll have to do what I did.

You didn't really think I'd go without telling you.

If you've stayed this long. I think you deserve the answer.

It's sough like plough or even sough like rough.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Is 'ough' the Trickiest Sound in English? | English Spelling & Prounciation Lesson

pronunciation

tough

deserve

panic