Or Billerica.
You guys are on an East Anglian theme tonight - Billericay proves tricky for many, too 
I’m from Yeovil, which is quite close to Dorchester. We always pronounced it as spelled (doorchester, where the e represents a schwa because I don’t know what the windows code for a schwa is)
Good god.
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No love for Bicester, then?
…but haven’t been there since about 1998. I did most of my growing up in Sherborne, anyway- I remember Westlands, the Quedam, Huish Park, and the Barclays Bank on the High Street, and that’s about it.
Nothing, but nothing is more nonsensical than the pronunciation of English town names. I have a D.Phil in English history and I lived in England for seven years and I still managed to mispronounce “Southwark” during a major presentation (only four people complained).
The Brits like to drop their "H"s, so it’s pretty clear.
Or Haverhill.
Westlands the helicopter engineering social club?
Don’t know it.
What of Picester-Savart anyway? I fear some English town-names are falling out of fashion.
Yes it is.
We don’t like to boast about it though:cool:
I lived in Seattle and Washington state has its share of crazy pronunciations, starting with Sequim, pronounced “skwim”.
Just down the road from here is the town of Southwell. Nobody (including the BBC) can decide whether it should be pronounced south-well of suth-ell.
Now for a really difficult one, how do you think Happisburgh, in Norfolk should be pronounced? Mind you we won’t have to worry for much longer as the whole place is rapidly falling into the sea because of coastal erosion.
No. The designer outlet doesn’t have big enough discounts.
No outsider ever gets the pronunciation of Havre right, especially if they assume we’re secretly French.
I’d like to say that Americans who pronounce Leicester as ‘Lie - Sester’ are completely logical.
On behalf of the English, I hope we didn’t embarrass you. :o
Soon my campaign to replace ‘pavement’ by the more descriptive ‘sidewalk’ will gather steam…
This is a little bit off-topic, but years ago Massachusetts had a governor named Peabody and his critics used to say that he was the only governor to have three towns in the state named after him: Peabody, Marblehead, and Athol.
Not sure about that one, though I wrote about the place in my dissertation. “Haps-boruh” was my guess.
Supporters of Manchester’s attempt to stage a marathon have to be very careful.
Believe it or not, it’s Haze-borough.