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Comment by shaftoe | Hacker News Reader

Southern US here. It's not Worchestersher sauce?

Bicester (Bister) and Gloucester (Gloster) are another couple of gotchas off the top of my head, and it's not like it even stops with places with *cester in the name.

I lived for a bit in a tiny town called Barnoldswick (stress on the "nolds"), but anyone from the area calls it "Barlick"! (stress on the "bar").

The accent here means that the phrase "pork pie" becomes "poo-wuk paaah" (stress on "poo" and "paaah") and the related steak-and-kidney-pie (which is served upside-down) was called a "babby's edd" (although I'm not sure if that's actually from nearby Bolton and is less about pronunciation I guess).

I thought “babby’s yed” was a Wigan thing

With smack barm pea wet?

Think of it as being Worce-ster-shire, not Wor-ces-ter-shire.

Pronounced “Wooster-sher”, though commonly you drop the “shire” for just “Wooster”. (That’s a short “woo” like in “wool”, not “woo” as in a romantic interest.)

“Wooster sauce.”

The audio on https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Worcester and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Worcestershire is correct (it says it's American, but it's the same in British).

Leicester (in Leicestershire) is a larger English city with the "-cester" suffix, meaning a Roman fort. The name is used in the US as a personal or family name: Lester.

Where the pronunciation is "ch", it's also spelt that way, as in Manchester.

Wooster-sheer

Wooster-shur

I would go one step further - I always pronounced it Wooster-shuh, even while living in the West Country where the R is normally elongated.

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