Dorchester pronounced Dooster?
Or maybe Mangrove Throatwarbler?
Is Worchestershire pronounced “Wooster?”
Manchester = Mancher?
It’s Worcestershire actually.
You’re right, of course. I was copying the OP, thinking he might be referring to something else.
Even so, is it pronounced “Wooster” or “Woostershire?”
I’ve always pronounced it “Worse-ter-shire.”
Yeah, but it’s pronounced wooster-shire. At least around here.
Worcester is pronounced “Wuster”/“Wooster”. Worcestershire is pronounced “Wustersher”. In the case of Worcestershire Sauce, I understand that some Brits drop the “shire”.
Similarly, Gloucester is pronounced “Gloster”, Leicester is “Lester”, and Cirencester is… well that’s another thread. “Sissiter”? I think it depends on who you ask.
Place names ending in -chester rather than -cester are pronounced more or less how a sane person would expect them to be pronounced. I can’t think of any exceptions, off the top of my head.
Worcestershire is properly pronounced Wooster if you are talking about the Lea & Perrins Sauce.
ETA As my esteemed colleague above has just pointed out.
Don’t be obtuse. It’s “Master”. :rolleyes:
Cirencester is not far from here and everybody I know pronounces it ‘Siren-cester’. The oft-quoted ‘Sissester’ as an alternative is rarely if ever heard, at least by me.
There’s not much logic to all these names. Leominster is pronouned ‘Lemster’ whereas Warminster, surprisingly, is spoken as ‘Warminster’. However, we are not alone. Leominster (pronounced “lemon-ster”) is a city in Worcester (articulated as Woo-ster) County, Massachusetts, United States.
Heh!
Wacha’ mean, “obtuse?” I’m not overweight. 
There really is a city of Wooster in Ohio. In a perfect universe, it would be pronounced “Wor-Ches-Ter”, but, of course, it’s pronounced just like the city in Massachusetts. Darnit.
If it was not clear from the foregoing, there is no ‘h’ in “Worcester.” There is one in “Dorchester,” though. Therefore, one can accurately predict how to pronouce “Leicester”.
In Boston, Dorchester is pronounced “Daw-chest-uh”. Quincy (next door) is pronounced “Kwin-zee”. Braintree is pronounced like it’s spelled, but strangely no one ever laughs at the name.
Worcester, Mass., is pronounced as “Whih-stah” by the locals. It makes more sense if you think of it as Worce-ster, e.g. “the city of Worce” (or hamlet or whatever -ster means.) Throw in the tendency of some of the English (and Bostonians) to drop their R’s and you get Wooster/Whihstah.
I grew up (and now live) not all that far from the original Braintree. It never struck me as funny or odd, either, until one day, giving someone directions, they burst out laughing.
I live in Wooster, OH, and we can tell immediately that someone is not from around here if s/he pronounces Wooster as though it rhymes with rooster. Appallingly, this egregious error was made in the movie “We Are Marshall.”
Ah, but nothing identifies an outsider like somebody who mispronounces Peabody.
One of my friends was from the mid-west and got a job at a radio station when he was going to school in Boston. There was a snow storm and he was the only one around to announce the school closures. The switchboard lit up (literally, this was in the 50’s) with people complaing about his pronounciation of Peabody and all the other names of cities around Boston.
You’re on the right track: the suffix is actually “cester”, or “chester” or “caster” : it derives from the Latin “castra”, or military camp, which later became the Anglo-Saxon “ceastre”. Any British town ending in “chester” or the like was originally a Roman military settlement; if it ends in “shire” it was, well, a shire or district. Worcestershire is thus the Anglo-Saxon name for the district around an old Roman garrison town. God knows who or what “Wor” {or more probably “weor”} was though: the original words have become pretty corrupted.