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Comment by pddpro | Hacker News Reader

Really? I've always pronounced it car (kar) because it's short for character which is pronounced karakter in the first place.

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Everybody seems to say ree-verb as short for reverberation. I don't say "reeverberation", I say something more like "ruhverberation" — which I don't think is an odd pronunciation — hence I say "ruhverb", but people look at me funny when I do.

Likewise I say char as "car".

Right, but what sound does ‘a’ have for you? In my region, car, carrot, and care are 3 different vowel sounds (with ‘car’ being totally different from the others) and ‘character’ sounds like ‘carrot’ and not at all like ‘car’.

If "carrot" and "care" don't rhyme with each other, what other words do they rhyme with?

For me the vowel in carrot and car is the same, while care is different and rhymes with pear.

Are you American? I’ve lived all over the US and never heard carrot as car-rot

Nope. Irish.

Again, it's regional. I have lived in places (Washington state, I think, as well as the South) where to my ear people said 'carrot' like 'care'. But where I'm from (northeast) carrot sounds like calculus, car sounds like calm, and care sounds like mare. Care is closer to cake ('longer'), carrot is 'short' like 'at'. Car is like with a little short 'o' mixed in, like in Spanish or the posh version of 'amen'.

I wish I knew the formal phonetic symbols of these, but I don't. But disambiguating these is just what they're for.

I live in Washington state but hail from Illinois, I’ve never heard anyone say carrot like car. It’s always been care-at

Well, carrot rhymes with parrot :-) But also, hat or cat.

Car rhymes with are, or charge.

And care with pear, pair, hair, etc.

But I'm Australian, so I talk funny.

I'm from NJ and that all aligns with my pronunciations

I used to live in Jersey City, maybe that explains it?

Maybe! I was actually considering saying I was from NY just to not make anyone think of a "Joisey" accent. I grew up in the suburbs which means a close tie to NYC despite the distance. And Jersey City being right across the river from NY certainly takes influence from there.

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