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You are better off looking in the dictionary! If you encounter an English word you don’t know while reading and guess at its pronunciation, there is a very real chance you will guess wrong. This even happens to native speakers. Almost every English-speaker can tell you about a word or words they thought was pronounced one way when they saw it, but it turned out to be pronounced differently. Now I’m not saying you should not guess first. Suppose you come across an unfamiliar word in your reading, “awry.” You might look at this word and theorize about its pronunciation. The first part looks like it rhymes with “saw,” and it ends like “Mary.” So maybe it’s AW-ree. On the other hand, many short words that end with the letter Y sound like the word “eye.” So it could be AW-r-eye. Or, English being what it is, it might be something else entirely. So now you look it up. It’s uh-RYE (rhymes with “a try”). Who knew!? You see what I mean? With very simple words, you are more likely to guess right. Pox rhymes with box, and boon rhymes with soon. But even then you can get it wrong! Grave and have don’t rhyme. So use your dictionary, or listen to the words pronounced online. |
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