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

My name is Mandy and this is our 179th episode.

We recently received a request from Michael in Montreal to talk about the silent P in words like pneumatic and psychology.

These words are part of bigger PN and PS spelling and pronunciation patterns that apply to both

the American English accent as well as the British accent. There will be some long and

possibly unfamiliar words in this episode, so don't forget that you can read the transcript

by going to www.pronuncian.com slash podcast. Let's begin with the P-N pattern.

The word pneumatic begins with the prefix, Numo, P-N-E-U-M-O, which relates to air or the lungs,

and is pronounced with a silent P.

In fact, almost all of the words that begin with the letters PN use the pneumo prefix.

The most common PN words are pneumatic and pneumonia.

You can also expect a silent P and words that begin with the letters P.S.

Along with Michael's example of psychology, there are the related words, psychological and psychologist,

and a number of other words that look mostly the same but have a different suffix. There are also the silent

P's in psychiatry and its cousin psychiatric, as well as the word psychic. The prefix

pseudo-P-S-E-U-D-O means fake or misleading and also has a silent P.

A pseudonym is a fake name, often used by authors.

P-sudoscience is a word that's used when someone believes something is scientifically proven, but isn't.

After hearing these examples, you might be surprised that we don't include these patterns

in the website as common spelling patterns.

This is because, of all of the words I used as examples today, only three are in the top

5,000 most frequently used words of English.

...