Hacker News Reader

Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

"Worcester" violates practically every convention of English spelling and pronunciation. Is there any other word in which "rce" even appears, let alone is silent?

[edit] Farce. Faaaaaa. Larceny. Lonnie?

View on HN

`egrep '^[a-z].*rce' /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v "'s" | wc` gives 157 for me but there's a lot of duplication - probably comes down to about 35 base words from a quick eyeball.

There are plenty of other place names that end in -cester pronounced as -ster: gloucester, leicester, bicester. It's somewhat of a rule itself. wor sounding more like woo is just the local accent I think.

I think what's confusing for Americans who didn't grow up with a lot of towns named that way is that "cester" is pronounced "ster", but "chester" is pronounced fully. Throw in a "shire" at the end of that and it's a mouthful.

"rce" is not a syllable here, so it's not that relevant. It's Wor + cester, and cester is always pronounced ster. So it's actually not very surprising.

Silent "ce" isn't really any less surprising to me. Where would I otherwise know this rule for "cester" from?

It's not really that "ce is silent", it's that cester is pronounced "ster". It's extremely common in languages that long, old roots like that are elided in speak - in French they basically always elide the last syllable!

cester/caster/chester (from castrum, meaning fort/castle) is a very common place name ending in English and the cester variant is almost always pronounced ster. Think Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester.

I now break it up in my head as "Worce", which isn't too far of a stretch to read as "worse", and then "ster".

It may be all kinds of wrong, I'm not sure, but it helped keep my sanity (on this one point...)

As far as the sauce, everyone I've heard in America pronounces it "worst-ah-sure".

I love Leicester Square in London which is pronounced Lester square.

Leicester (the city, not the square in London named for it) is just south of the town of Loughborough.

Leicestershire in general has more than its fair share of difficult placenames: Ashby de la Zouch, South Croxton, Kirby Bellars, Belvoir, Rotherby vs Rothley, Frisby on the Wreake, Nether Broughton, Kibworth Beauchamp, Glooston* (not sure of this one myself), Wymeswold.

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/52.7457/-1.0495

I have to say the biggest challenge I had was hiking in wales in Snowdonia and trying to inquire about town and village names. I ended up writing them down to show because I butchered the names no matter how much I tried.

Welsh is a completely different language, with its own writing system.

dd → th, ff → f, ll → hl (ish), w → oo gets you most of the way to being understood as a tourist, in my experience. (Though I'm British, so I've heard many of the larger Welsh place names pronounced properly since childhood, via TV/radio etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_orthography#Letter_names...

How many syllables are pronounced in 'Loughborough'?

All three, but the last two are schwas: /ˈlʌfbərə/

Interesting fact: There was a running joke in PC Gamer (UK) about how odd/terrible Loughborough is..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com