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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 144th episode.

Knock, a Vietnamese user on the English Assembly forums, brought up a question about adjectives that end in ED that do not follow the typical ED ending patterns.

Simply put, the ED ending patterns state that the ED will be pronounced as a D sound when it follows a voiced sound, as in the word loved,

a T sound when it follows an unvoiced sound, as in the word liked, and a short I plus D sound,

when it follows a D sound or a T sound, as in the word needed.

When the short I plus D sound pronunciation is used, the word gains a syllable.

For instance, the past of to need is needed. The word need is one syllable, and needed is two syllables.

Adding only a D sound or a T sound for the ED ending will not cause an added syllable.

For example, the words love and like are one syllable, and so are loved and liked. So if we have this

very nice pattern to follow, what is going on with the words wicked, crooked, learned, ragged, and blessed. Why are those words pronounced with two syllables instead of one?

Uh-oh, is something wrong with our pattern that says that only words that end in a T sound or D sound

are supposed to have an added syllable?

Well, two things are going on here.

First, these words are obviously exceptions to our pattern and sorry, but their pronunciation

should be memorized.

There is something exceptional about these exceptions, though.

They are all adjectives.

Now, this does not mean that the ED ending patterns only work for verbs,

and that all adjectives that end in ED gain a syllable.

These words are still exceptions, because most adjectives still follow the pattern listed at the beginning of this podcast.

Grammatically speaking, the ED ending usually forms the past participle of a word, and the past participle can be used to conjugate verbs and create adjectives.

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