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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Elevators and Fridges used to be brand names (of the Otis Elevator company and Frigidaire, respectively)

There's no real reason to think "fridge" is shortened from "Frigidaire" as opposed to "refrigerator".

And plenty of reason to think against. The "dg" sound doesn't come through in "Frigidaire" at all. It does have an actual letter "d" present, but with the "i" in between the sound becomes entirely different. Compare to refrigerator, where the "frige" portion of the word slants easily to rhyme with "ridge."

I can't go that far. What country are you from? I would have said the second syllable of "refrigerator", and the first syllable of "Frigidaire", both obligatorily rhyme with "ridge". There's no alternative.

"Frigidaire" should only really differ from "frigid air" in terms of prosody.

I think they're assuming Frigidaire is pronounced with a hard G, which is fair enough if you haven't heard it spoken before.

I'm actually assuming it pronounced with a more enunciated J sound than other poster accents seem to. I've always heard frigid with the emphasis on the "J" sound, rather than the softer blended j sound that produces the "dg" blend.

California. I suppose it's just a difference in accent, because I've always heard Frigid pronounced somewhat like fri-jid, with a clear enunciation between the parts, rather than the blended "dg" sound.

Well, in Spanish a refrigerator can be colloquially called a "frigider". I've never seen it in writing though.

In Italy it is the same.

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