It’s always been ‘ex-SPARE-i-ment’ as far as I know. Yet, lately I’ve been hearing it pronounced ‘ex-SPEAR-i-mint’ a lot lately, mostly by younger people I think, say, the oldest Gen Zs or younger millenials. Just this past week I heard it pronounced the minty way in a TV commercial and a YouTube video.
Is it a generational thing? A regional thing?
ETA: there’s a poll a couple posts down…
ex-PERR-i-ment (“PERR” as in “Perry”).
I thought this was going to be a reference to Sheldon Cooper, as he pronounces that way on Big Bang Theory. That character / actor is from Texas, so maybe it is a regional thing? Personally, I’ve only ever said it the same as the OP.
Oh hey, I’ll put a poll in before I get too many replies…
0 voters
I say ek-sperr-iment, with sperr rhyming with perry. Both spare and spear look equally weird to me.
Spear here.
It sounds like you both pronunce it the way I do, I just phonetically spelled it differently. ‘sperr’ or ‘perr’ as in ‘Perry’ is the same as saying ‘spare’, rhyming with ‘pear’, no?
PERR and PEAR are different sounds
I’m… not sure: it’s not something I’ve ever thought about before, but I think I lean more toward the “spear” pronunciation (same first two syllables as in “experience”) than the “spare.”
Doing a little googling, I find this, which suggests that it may indeed be a generational thing:
So how do you pronounce PERR as in ‘PERRY’ then? I would pronounce it ‘PAIR-ee’. As in, Perry Mason.
The vowel sound is “eh” in Perry, not “ay”–do you pronounce “air” and “err” identically?
Interesting link, Thudlow, thanks! The daughter in that link is from Montana, so maybe it’s generational and regional…?
I do. Not everyone does.
We’re running into our old pal, the Mary-merry-marry merger here, my friends.
In the specific case of the name Perry, yes, and that’s not unusual. Watch an episode of SCrubs where they say Dr. Cox’s first name. It’s pronounced “Pair-ee.”
Not where I come from.
I do. It’s possible that that’s an err on my part, that I pulled that pronunciation out of the air, or perhaps that is a regional thing…?
Where do you come from, may I ask?
NYC metro area
Didn’t we have a long post on Mary-merry-marry regional pronunciations fairly recently? I may have to look that up and cross reference it with where slicedalone is from. Oh man, I may have just dug a rabbit hole for myself here…
Almost certainly. It crops up sooner or later in almost every thread we have about pronunciation. Inevitably you get people saying, “X rhymes with Y, but A rhymes with B.” And other people will say, “But all four of those rhyme!”
Using IPA would help very much in these sorts of discussions, but for some reason many people are triggered by IPA.
I personally get more friendly and agreeable after a certain amount of IPA, but yeah, some do get more argumentative under the influence.