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Comment by edgyquant | Hacker News Reader

It’s pronounced your-uh-ness by pretty much everyone (or your-ah-noose if your going by the greek god and not the Latin copy/paste.)

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I think "pretty much everyone" is an exaggeration. Google's pronunciations (British and US) are both the 'anus' version -- though the British one has a secondary stress on the first syllable, rather than the schwa of the US version.

Growing up in Australia, the British 'you-ray-nəs' (i.e. not quite 'your anus', but only because of the first vowel sound) is the pronunciation I was familiar with. Lately I've heard 'you-rə-nəs' fairly often, but not exclusively.

in Arabic (and a bunch of other languages I'm sure) it's pronounced: Oranos, I don't understand why the U in Uranus is not pronounced like the U in Ultra.

In Russian it's simply "Ooran".

Cuz in Greek (my mother language), we pronounce "Ουρανός" as "Ouranos".

> ”Our

Good to know, I guess...

A shot in the dark but I think there’s a lot of “ult”s in English but not many “ura”s

Uranium and Urine

> or your-ah-noose if your going by the greek god

I doubt that Οὐρανός is pronounced anywhere close to "your-ah-noose", unless you're pronouncing "your-ah-noose" in a very strange way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQTKGXmITZg

This just sounds like "urine us". Potato, potato?

https://www.gocomics.com/getfuzzy/2003/02/18

Leave it to HN to explain grammar, some history and a bit of etymology in response to a childish joke comment.

And, that's why this place is great.

Hope I can contribute, because this is actually very interesting. According to this [1], the most common American pronunciation was closer to "Your anus" (accent on the A in anus) until 1986, when a space probe was flying by and news casters thought weeks of that would get too "giggly", so they deliberately started pronouncing it "Urine us" (accent on the first syllable).

[1] https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/content/story/anus-urine-us-...

Thank you. That was amusing to read and I never actually realized there was so much about the pronunciation, I've heard a few different ones. but I always took it for regional dialect differences not something done intentionally. I may have sounded sarcastic, but I was genuinely serious, I really do enjoy the interesting factoids spawned by sometimes the most innocuous comments on HN. HN really does have a lot of people knowledgeable about a huge range of things.

I prefer to call it the Georgium Sidus!

Nope. I say your-anus.

You might but that is an incorrect pronunciation and the only time I’ve heard that (other than from people who aren’t into astronomy) was in elementary school and even then the teacher told us it was a common, but wrong, pronunciation.

A thread of people discussing pronunciations without saying where they are from or using IPA is a pointless waste of time. You may as well be talking about what time it is by posting “well, it’s dark here!”

Location/accent is important, but sometimes we can get by without IPA. There will be some ambiguity, but often we're sufficiently familiar with each other's accents to interpret phonetic spellings as intended. (Though I do think the ə symbol is indispensable, because representing the schwa sound with 'uh' is just confusing.)

edit: sorry, just realised I probably misread you (as saying we should say where we're from and use IPA), in which case this comment is redundant.

It doesn’t really matter where you’re from. If you pronounce Uranus as your-anus you are pronouncing it wrong.

Your-anus! Ahh! Take that!

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