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The change took place in educated London speech around the end of the 16th century, and explains why there is no [ɡ] sound at the end of words like fang, sing, wrong and tongue in the standard varieties of Modern English. [28] The change in fact applies not only at the end of a word, but generally at the end of a morpheme.
This is a list of British English words that have different American English spellings, for example, colour (British English) and color (American English). Word pairs are listed with the British English version first, in italics, followed by the American English version: spelt, spelled; Derived words often, but not always, follow their root.
The voiceless velar and palatal fricative sounds [x] and [ç], considered to be allophones of /h/ and reflected by the gh in the spelling of words such as night, taught and weight, were lost in later Middle English or in Early Modern English. Their loss was accompanied by certain changes in the previous vowels.
The opposite of H-dropping, called H-insertion or H-adding, sometimes occurs as a hypercorrection in English accents that typically drop H. It is commonly noted in literature from late Victorian times to the early 20th century that some lower-class people consistently drop h in words that should have it, while adding h to words that should not ...
Such t-glottalization also occurs in many British regional accents, including Cockney, where it can also occur at the end of words, and where /p/ and /k/ are sometimes treated the same way. [25] For some RP-speakers, final voiceless stops, especially /k/, may become ejectives. [26] Among stops, both fortes and lenes:
[4] [20] The addition and deletion of a silent e at the ends of words was also sometimes used to make the right-hand margin line up more neatly. [20] By the time dictionaries were introduced in the mid-17th century, the spelling system of English had started to stabilise. By the 19th century, most words had set spellings, though it took some ...
The final consonant of an English word is sometimes doubled in both American and British spelling when adding a suffix beginning with a vowel, for example strip/stripped, which prevents confusion with stripe/striped and shows the difference in pronunciation (see digraph). Generally, this happens only when the word's final syllable is stressed ...
In the vowels chart, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, alongside the words used to name their corresponding lexical sets. The diaphonemes for the lexical sets given here are based on RP and General American; they are not sufficient to express all of the distinctions found in other dialects, such as Australian English.