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Comment by vcxy | Hacker News Reader

In fact they are not pronounced the same. English is weird, sure, but I think if you have that kind of misconception then it's going to seem far stranger.

"Loose" rhymes with "juice", "lose" rhymes with "news", if that helps.

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Lose generally (RP, and I think 'most' dialects) does not rhyme with news.

'Lose' rhymes with 'two's [complement]'; 'news' rhymes with 'pews'. (The latter pair has a /j/ or 'yuh sound' before the vowel.)

(Heh, really is a can of worms isn't it: 'choose' rhymes with 'lose'; not with 'loose'. Poor ESL learners, no envy from me! Hindi/devanagari, which I'm learning as a second language, is so easy by comparison.)

> 'news' rhymes with 'pews'

This must be a regional thing. I've never heard someone pronounce "news" as "nyooze". "Pews" is pronounced that way, however.

Default en-GB pronunciation is njuːz.

Wow, what a blind spot I have. Of course. When I imagine a Briton saying it, I hear that pronunciation.

I'm en-US, obviously :)

Ah, well, I neglected to think/realise AmE was generally 'nooze' too... So I might have to retract 'most dialects' (at least in the way I meant it which was counting speakers rather than distinct dialects).

The other form you often see this in is long 'u's being 'oo' rather than (as I would say) roughly 'ew'. (Duplicate, repudiate, muse, etc.)

Are you from the Northeast US? I pronounce news rhyming with pews that way.

Southwest England. (Ha, really.)

How do you pronounce 'news'? As an american I've only ever heard it as 'nyooz'. Do you say 'nooz'?

Yup. Rhymes with "booze", "snooze", "ooze", and "screws".

... and "lose" to bring this full circle.

That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing, I had no idea other Americans say 'nooz'instead of 'nyooz' as I say

Huh, I didn't realize it was pronounced that way outside of the US. Definitely a blind spot for me.

News and Lose rhyme for me. Must be a dialect thing. I was raised in Texas, California, Florida, and Indiana - so I'm not sure what dialect I speak.

Lose, two's, news, and pews ALL rhyme for me.

To add to this (because the difference was really not clear to me from your suggested rhymes):

The difference is in the sound of the final s. "loose" ends with "s" from "set", whereas "lose" ends with the z from "zoo".

And while the vocal sound is the same according to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/loose, I feel that there is (or can be) some difference there. Just like in "jews" vs "juice".

They are shown with different pronunciations. Do you mean the recordings? They sound different to my British ear.

Definitely different to my American ear as well.

I meant "the sound of the vocal" (the o vs oo), not "the spoken sound" when I said "the vocal sound".

The vowel! Yes, they are the same.

I don't know, I personally understood the comment without any problem and wasn't even aware that loose was used instead of lose until it was pointed out. I got the meaning perfectly well from the context. To me these kind of comments pointing out to misspelled words are pedantic at best. And I take back that they're pronounced the same, I ran it through my head a few sentences and there's a difference at the end but it still does not make any sense and these rules are quite arbitrary and sometimes even contradictory.

Why does lose pronounce the way it does when nose doesn't pronounce as noose, pose doesn't pronounce as poose, lol.. It's even funny if you ask me.

Let the grammar police whip me down with downvotes but I still stand up by my opinion, English is a frigging weird language full of quirks. I speak 4 languages and 2 of them are Latin based and almost never run into the same kind of issues as English. French does not pronounce the way it is written but at least is consistent about it.

And nobody bothered to respond to the original comment other than making pedantic remarks. You've got too much free time on your hands.

> Let the grammar police (...)

Wouldn't this be a case for the orthography police?

> > Let the grammar police (...)

> Wouldn't this be a case for the orthography police?

At least we already have the semantics police on the scene

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