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

My name is Mandy and this is our 188 episode.

Sometimes inspiration appears and it just must be followed.

At least that's how I feel about this episode.

I had a different episode planned, but then I was working on finalizing an upcoming presentation

in which I had decided to add a bit of content about heteronyms.

Then, around the same time, I came across a picture on the Grammarly

Facebook page of a confused-looking man in a crowd. The caption read, Lead rhymes with

Reed. Lead rhymes with red. Or it could have been, Lead with red, lead rhymes with read.

Ah, there's our friend, the heteronym.

A heteronym is a set of words that are spelled the same, but are pronounced differently,

like L-E-A-D being pronounced as lead, long-e, when it's being used as a verb and lead, short-e, when

it's being used as a noun.

Or R-E-A-D being pronounced as read, long-E, when it's being used in the present tense, and read, short-e, when it's being used in the present tense and red short e when it's being used in the

past tense lead and read and read and read don't follow any convenient

pronunciation pattern you just need to know those words but some heteronyms do follow a pattern.

Which ones?

The two-syllable nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and the A-TE-suffix both have very handy patterns.

Today we're going to talk about two-syllable nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and two-syllable heteronyms.

The general syllable stress pattern for two-syllable nouns and adjectives is that they're

usually stressed on the first syllable. Two-syllable verbs are usually stressed on the second

syllable. Lots of words fit in this pattern. Some two-syllable verbs are usually stressed on the second syllable.

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