cot-caught merger

/ˈkɑt kɔt ˌmɝd͡ʒɚ/

Word Rarity Rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.13 in modern English

Scrabble Score

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Meaning

noun

A phonemic merger in some varieties of English (especially American, Canadian and Scottish English) in which the vowels in words such as hot and doll (/ɒ/) and in words such as law and talk (/ɔː/) are pronounced identically, making the words cot and caught homophones.

"One was /au/-monophthongisation, described earlier in Chapter 2, while the second was the so-called low-back merger (LBM), also referred to as the cot–caught merger because words in these two classes are pronounced the same and speakers cannot hear any small differences in their pronunciation, even when they are present."

cot-caught mergers (plural)

father-bother merger

father-bother merger

low back merger

Questions

How do you pronounce cot-caught merger?

The recorded pronunciation is /ˈkɑt kɔt ˌmɝd͡ʒɚ/.

What does cot-caught merger mean?

How to pronounce cot-caught merger

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