Hacker News Reader

Comment by dghf | Hacker News Reader

"Worcester" and "Norwich" are sort of regular, in the sense that the "ces" in "-cester" suffixes often gets elided into an "s" (e.g. "Gloucester", pronounced "Gloster") and the "w" in "-wick" and "-wich" suffixes is typically dropped completely (e.g. "Greenwich", "Warwick", "Berwick", pronounced "Grennidge", "Worick", "Berick" respectively).

My mother has always insisted that "Cirencester" is correctly pronounced "Sisister", which Wikipedia sort of supports (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirencester#Pronunciation).

View on HN

Gloucester makes sense if you consider that it's pronounced "Glouce-ster" rather than "Glou-cester". You wouldn't pronounce Glouce as "Glou-se", but to rhyme with "grouse".

I always thought it was pronounced 'glosster' ...

It is, I think GP means it makes sense if you view the syllable break there, and then shorten it and say it quickly because you're lazy and that's what happens.

Yep, exactly, thanks. Mainly my point was "it makes sense if you consdier that the syllable break is after Glouce rather than after Glou".

I was somewhere between baffled and delighted when I discovered that Bicester is pronounced "Bister".

Also Berkeley and Berkshire are pronounced with a "bar" sound in UK English, but "burr" in the US, I believe.

True; and yet the British pejorative "berk" ("fool", "idiot") rhymes with "work" but is supposedly a contraction of "Berkeley Hunt" (rhyming slang for a word much ruder than the fairly mild "berk").

And of course good old Worcestershire sauce, which can be a mouthful if English isn't your first language.

Where I'm from there are probably 3+ common and different ways to pronounce it.

No, it's tough no matter what your first language is, unless you've learned how the locals pronounce it. "Wuster-sher". Easy peasy.

Don't forget Southwark! (Sutherk)

That's interesting because North Berwick, South Berwick, and Berwick in southern Maine are pronounced Ber-wick.

It's common for us place names to have drifted from their origin.

The Egyptian Cairo is pronounced ky-row but the American is pronounced kay-row.

There's a running joke about the American pronunciation of Loughborough.

Similarly, Norwich, Connecticut is pronounced Nor-which locally.

I have read (no source at hand though) that that one used to be "Nor-itch" but during the 20th century the pronunciation was gradually forgotten and replaced with a spelling pronunciation. If I remember correctly the same was true of Warwick ("War-ick") Rhode Island.

Same thing happened with Berkeley in the US: originally "Barclay", and still pronounced "Barclay" in the UK.

Those wacky Nutmeggers (who badly need a standard demonym by the way) also pronounce their local Thames River as thaymz and yes that's with the th as in thick. But they do pronounce Greenwich (CT) as the English do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com