Gramer Girl here, I'm Inyon Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about a tricky

pronunciation and a game called The Dozens.

A couple of weeks ago, I pronounced the name of a keyboard instrument as pianofort, and I did it on purpose after checking

multiple dictionaries. I always thought it was pronounced pianoforte, but I often check

pronunciations when it's not a word I use every day, and dictionaries seemed to tell me otherwise.

It was clear there were multiple possible pronunciations, but

Pianofort seemed to be the one most dictionaries favored for American English. But it turns out

a lot of you thought it was Piano Forte, too. And there is a similar, more common word that also

causes confusion. So let's learn more.

First, for Pianaforte, Pianaforte, here's an overview of what I found.

Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com both put the pronunciation Piannafort first, but both follow it with other acceptable pronunciations,

such as pianoforte. Dictionary.com actually has five possible pronunciations, and the Oxford

English Dictionary has two different British pronunciations, piano forte first and piano forte second. So that's an interesting exercise,

but you probably don't talk about pianoforts or pianofortes very often. There's also a more

common word, though, that has the same problem. F-O-R-T-E, as in, oh yes, grammar is my forte, or is that grammar

is my fort? Or if you're British, it might be your forte. And besides referring to a strength,

this word can also mean to play something loudly in music. The pronunciation problem here arose

because this one word with the single spelling is actually two different words, borrowed into English

from two different sources. The first F-O-R-T-E entered English from French in the 1600s. It originally referred to the

strongest part of a sword blade, the section between the middle and the hilt. The opposite end

near the tip was called the foible, which now means a minor weakness, so we got both words

from fencing. From that literal meaning, Fort developed

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