See: OU — Oh no! Test yourself! This is the crazy and difficult part about English spelling patterns! It would be really nice if all the words that look the same had the same vowel sound.
Be sure to memorize the pronunciation of the most frequently used words. The most frequent words have a much higher percentage of unusual spelling patterns.
You want to be sure that you are confident about how to pronounce the words that you need to use most often in English. So, try saying a new word with the sound that you think is most likely to be the right choice, but be ready to switch to the other options if you find that your first choice is not right.
Short-a2 sound Short-o Short-o1 really share the same sound. Short-a2: water, father, ball, car… Short-o: not, otter, bother, top…. Some dialects distinguish between these sounds, but even then, they are really very similar and hard for learners to distinguish, so the most straightforward approach is to think of them as the same.
For many native speakers, they are the same, and anyone who learns to speak English this way will be perfectly clear and understandable! You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. It's commonly replaced with the sound of "more" in both regions, so it's really not necessary to learn it. If you do, the British pronunciation is somewhat similar to the sound in German "nur".
As user mentions, there is another pronunciation of oo that only occurs in two words: blood , flood. The usual pronunciation is "long", as in "goose"; the "short" vowel sound of "foot" is actually pretty rare.
The short pronunciation can generally be seen as conditioned by some kind of "shortening environment". The article gives two contradictory accounts of the development of the vowel in "wool", for example. And since I am a self-admitted amateur, you should also take this following section with a grain of salt but if you find an error, I'd appreciate a comment or edit! Here is an overview of these shortening environments.
Speaking here of the pronunciations that contributed to modern standard English; it is well known that there is regional variability, and some regions apparently don't show shortening in "-ook" words. Shortening is variable and apparently fairly recent in at least some cases. There's some dialectal variation today for root. As far as I can tell, "woof" is unrelated.
See " Rhyme in Elizabethan sonnets ". These words tend to have unusual etymologies, often with irregular development from Old English if they even go back that far. OneLook and its indexed dictionaries were used along with the Oxford English Dictionary to find etymological information. Information on the Great Vowel shift taken in part from this great "Great Vowel Shift" handout from Anthony Kroch's website , which I also learned about from Josh's answer to the following question: Why do "bomb" and "tomb" have different pronunciations?
The difference between "google" and "book" is more that "book" is a very short "oo" sound so a German "u", but very short whereas "google" and "yahoo" are long "oo" sounds. I'd say the general rule is that "oo" is a long sound, and "book" and "door" are exceptions to the rule. Another exception is the word "good", which also has a short sound like in "put", "could" and "should".
Like Al suggested in his comment, there's also "cooperate", which is pronounced like "co-operate", as if the two "o"s where distinct. There are actually FOUR y'all are forgetting blood , flood. Relating to the "why" part of the question, the answer is very complicated and there is no compact set of answers, therefore there are no hard and fast rules. The words that have what we call the "short oo", such as "book", "hook", etc. Words with the long "oo" as in "pool" and "cool" are evenly split between German "u" these words would have originally had a "short oo" but evolved with time and dialect , German "uh" which usually has the "ooh" pronunciation , and French "ou" again nearly identical to a "long oo"; "pool" came from " poule ", and "poor" was originally the Old French " poure " which in the French language was further influenced by Latin to become the modern " pauvre ".
Words with the "oh" sound were either influenced by the "Great Vowel Shift", or have become more relaxed in pronunciation with the rise of American regional dialects. Most Americans would pronounce "poor" and "moor" the way most B. Words like "door" were influenced towards [o] very early in their life as the proto-Germanic " dur " and Old French " porte " met in Saxony and Briton to form the old English " dor ".
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Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why are there 3 different ways to pronounce "oo"? Food, foot, floor, flood. Zoology, the study of animals, zoo, a place where animals are kept. Same root, different pronunciation of OO. OH, broo-, brooch. A brooch is a piece of jewelry that you can pin to your shirt or jacket.
There are also four vowels that can be made with the double O: Food, foot, floor, flood. Book, cook, hook, look, took.
And any words that are variations or compound words, like bookshelf, bookstore, bookworm, bookmark, booking, books. Cooking, cookbook. Fishhook, unhook. Looks, looking, lookout. Mistook, undertook. Good, hood, wood, and related words like: goodbye, lots of words that end in —hood like neighborhood, boyhood, girlhood, adulthood.
We have woods, woodpecker, woodcutter, plywood, redwood, hardwood. We have brook, booger, cookie. And the most common pronunciation, the OO vowel like in: too, boot, cool, moon, mood, boom, doom, food, goofy, fool, hoop, loop, noon, oops, ooze, roof, soon, cartoon, bloom, aloof, boost, booze, broom, hoop, moose, proof, scoop, shoot, stoop, bamboo, Google, goose.
Were any of the pronunciations different from what you thought?
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