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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 201st podcast. I recently received a quick little email from a person named Sarah who said,

Hey, I have a quick question about a word.

The pronunciation book says that consonant, O, consonant should always sound the short O sound,

but the word symptom, T-O-M, sounds different.

I hope you can answer my question. Thank you.

Sarah's question talks about the pronunciation book, but I want all you listeners to know that

the same information she's referring to is available on the website, www.prenuncian.com.

I'll link to the lessons I talk about here on this episode's transcript page. Sarah's question actually brings up a lot of things. First, be careful with thinking that

anything should always be pronounced a certain way in English. English just has very few instances of

something always being pronounced only one way. Because of this, there are a few areas of the book

and website to help with this problem. Both the book and the website cover all of the sounds of English,

and along with listing

common spellings for each sound, it also lists pronunciations that are also possible for

that spelling.

So if I look at the short O lesson, I see one common spelling, the consonant O consonant spelling. This means that

if a single letter O is between two consonants or is even the first letter of the word,

it might be pronounced to the short O. The examples in the lesson are the words odd, box, and shock.

Then the next column of the spelling table lists other pronunciations for each spelling.

For the consonant O-consonant spelling, it lists both the long O sound and the A-W sound. An example of the O spelling being pronounced

as a long O is the word most. And an example of it being pronounced as the A.W sound is the word

dog. Now that I've told you all of that confusing stuff about the consonant O consonant spelling,

...