Hi again, and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 132nd episode.

This week, I went back to my copy of a frequency dictionary of contemporary American English to see

which words spelled E-A are pronounced with a long e and which are pronounced with a short E. The long

e sounds like E. It's the vowel sound in the word keep. My tongue is held very high in my mouth

during this sound. E. The short E, is not just held for less time. The shape of my tongue is actually different. To create the short

e sound, my tongue is much lower in my mouth and is only slightly rounded upward. Listen to the short

e sound. It's the sound in the word bed.

An example of a word spelled E-A and pronounced with a long E sound is the word team, T-E-A.

An example of a word spelled E-A that is pronounced with a short E sound is head, H-E-A-D.

I was hoping my frequency dictionary would show me a very straightforward pattern with few exceptions.

Unfortunately, I found a list of words much more complicated

than I was expecting. There are 116 words in the top 2,000 most frequently used words that include

the EA spelling. Sixty- 68 of those words, or 59%, are pronounced with a long e sound.

So, if you want the very simple answer, long e is the better guess for the pronunciation

of the EA spelling in an unfamiliar word.

If you don't want to get confused with the messy, complicated details, stop listening here.

The problem you see is that the remaining 41% of the words are not all pronounced with the short e sound. Instead, the remaining words are broken

into a number of different categories. Thankfully, the largest category is the short e sound,

with 22 words. So the good news is that a total of 78% of the words spelled EA are pronounced with either a long e or a short E.

But what about the rest of them?

First, we have the eight words that are spelled E-A-R and pronounced as schwa plus R.

...