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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

weary (tired) -> wary (concerned)

not nit-picking, just attempting to help other readers who aren't native English speakers

For those that don’t know, they are sometimes pronounced the exact same, which is why they are often mixed up (see also affect and effect). Where I’m from weary is pronounced WEER-y though.

Not true (at least in the US): weary (at least the adjective) is pronounced with a "we" at the beginning, while wary is pronounced with a "wear" at the beginning.

I hear "weary" spoken so very rarely that I have no idea how it's pronounced here (Indiana). I can't even make up my mind how I pronounce it, but I'd wager it's almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from wary.

One is w-ee-ry the other w-ah-ry.

Yes...ish. That's the correct pronunciation, but neither are used frequently enough for me to be confident that's the actual pronunciation, and I'd wager it's different in different places.

> w-ah-ry

I've always heard it pronounced way-ree.

Ware-ee?

Of course it varies with accent and locale. So phonetic transcriptions don't help unless we use IPA. But in British English, "weary" has a diphthong and "wary" does not. Very distinctly different words.

On the subject, we pronounce "router" and "router" (two different words, same spelling) differently, one with a diphthong, one without.

They're also sometimes spelled the same. Doesn't make it correct.

Thanks for saying it right. This will help me remember.

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