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

My name is Mandy, and this is our 71st episode.

Way back in mid-June, a question was asked on the forums about the number of syllables in the

word, interesting. Dictionaries show it as both a three- and four-syllable word, as in

interesting and interesting. The discussion about that word led to things other than the number of syllables in the word,

but it's only the optional number of syllables in the word interesting,

as well as other common words that I'm going to talk about today.

The linguistic term for the loss of a syllable and spoken word is syncope,

but I simply refer to it as dropped syllables. Other examples of dropped syllables are in the

words, every, favorite, and different.

That was,

every versus every, or favorite versus favorite,

or, different versus different.

Dropping syllables occurs mostly on high frequency words,

and dictionaries are pretty good about showing both options

when two choices of pronunciation are available. The syllable that can be dropped, not surprisingly, follows a pattern.

The syllables before or after a stressed syllable in a word are often unstressed.

This is opposed to a secondary stress that can occur two syllables apart from a stressed syllable.

Only the vowel sounds of unstressed syllables can get dropped,

and usually the original word needed to have at least three syllables to begin with.

I mentioned four different words above, which I'll repeat now.

Interesting. Every. Favorite. Different. Different. Here are some more examples.

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