In American pronunciation, the d is silent in Wednesday. Say wenz-day or wenz-dee.

If you disagree about forte and schism, you are not disagreeing with us; we just report. You are disagreeing with authorities who have devoted their lives to studying words.

There’s surprising inconsistency in dictionaries. Which brings me to “diction”: traditionalists would say you misuse it in this post, that it means “choice of words,” not “pronunciation.” Which is why languages with more logical spelling systems than ours can have dicionarios, dizionarii and so on that don’t even indicate pronunciation except in words that behave strangely.

Cheers

Our dictionaries indicate that both pronunciations are acceptable, though we lean toward pronouncing the i.

Thank you for your kind words. We’re happy to hear how much you enjoy the newsletters.

If you do a pronunciation issue again, please include Poinsettia. I heard on the show A Way With Words that the correct pronunciation would be Poin-sett-a (the last i being silent). However, everyone (including newscasters) seems to pronounce it as though it has four syllables instead of three, and stressing that silent i.

Thank you very much! I love these newsletters!

You’re the best!

Realtor is high on our list. These pronunciation articles will be a recurring feature on our website.

We share your concern and frustration regarding this silly pronunciation. However, the word is out on “nook-ya-ler.” We will get around to it eventually, but for now we are more concerned with other words that will surprise a lot of smart readers and careful speakers like you. By the way, we noticed that if you Google “pronouncing nuclear” there are 65 million listings.

I wonder if some day you’d clarify pronunciation of the word nuclear. President Bush seemed to pronounce differently from myself and others I know.