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

My name is Amanda and this is our 210th episode.

Today I'm going to talk about words that end in the letters U.E.

I'm talking about words like unique, avenue, and rescue.

You might not have noticed it, but each of those words had a different pronunciation for the U.E.

In the word unique, the U.E was silent. In the word avenue, the U-E was silent.

In the word avenue, the U-E was pronounced as the O-O sound,

ooh, like in the word soon.

In the word rescue, the U-E was pronounced as the long U sound,

you, like in the word cute.

Those words again were unique, avenue, and rescue.

So we have three words and three different pronunciations.

Is there a pattern?

Well, sort of.

Let's begin with the pattern for when the U.E is silent.

In addition to the word unique, it is also silent in the following words.

See if you can notice the pattern.

Antique, Technique, Botesque, fatigue, fatigue, colleague, colleague, vogue, league. What do all of those words have in common?

If you noticed that all of them are spelled either Q-U-E or G-U-E, you are correct.

This pattern works quite well too.

There's only one very common word that is spelled a G-U-E that includes a vowel

sound at the end. That word is argue. What is the final sound in the word?

...