I’ve always heard it and pronounced it the same way as @BwanaBob: tur-kwoize
Turk-oize sounds really weird. It would be like pronoucing quote as coat.
Briquette
Are you in the UK? That’s standard there. In the US, tur-KOYZ is the more usual.
That doesn’t have a “quo”
Coquette
No. NYC.
That’s funny 'cause so am I
I’ve lived in New York, California, and places in between, yet I never heard “ex-PEER…” until I moved to Wisconsin, where everyone says that. Everywhere else, it’s “ex-PEAR…”.
Not everywhere I’ve lived, and I’ve lived in a lot of places.
That’s the normal pronunciation for me. And stirrup rhymes with it – “stir” + “up”.
To my surprise, quoin is pronounced both ways. I’ve always pronounced it “koin”.
(Add me to the “terkoiz” list for turquoise.)
que, not quo
I’m in my 60’s and never came across this word before. Thanks.
I wonder if NYC is one of the regions that pronounces it in the US with a /kw/, assuming this is a regional feature. I just clicked on some random Youtube videos of “turquoise” and every (or almost every – there was one I couldn’t quite tell – there may have been a very soft /w/ snuck in there) single one (I sampled seven) pronounced it with a /k/ and not a /kw/.
However, the set of videos (by the same uploader) I got when searching for “turquoise nyc” does have a /kw/. So I suspect there may be some validity to the regional dialect hypothesis. I can’t find any dialect map specifically for that word, though.
I was wondering if someone else would say “turquoise” this way, but I guess my pronunciation is in a distinct minority among American speakers: I pronounce it turk-WISE. In IPA, /tɝ’kwaɪs/.
I’ve known it since I was in my early 20s. Probably learnt it playing Scrabble. 