# Is the US pronunciation of "solder" unique to the US ? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 9, 2014, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997 "2014-09-09T19:12:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 6
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2015, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/102 "2015-05-11T14:05:19Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Why don’t you pronounce the b in debt? Well, the borrowed French word was and is dette, pronounced pretty much like debt and some a-hole added the b because the Latin root had it… Which has resulted in the linguistic doublet debt/debit, which of course now have similar but not exactly the same meanings. ---
**Author:** ![julezz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/838e76/32.png) [@julezz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/julezz)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/103 "2020-05-04T03:35:16Z")
I think it is unique to the US. Semi-funny story: When I first started making jewelry, I actually looked up the word, “sauter” after watching a video on soldering. I thought it was a different technique I needed to learn. The link to the article I found actually did explain that it was a pronunciation that originated in the northeastern US and I suppose the rest of us in the States followed. Wish I could remember where I found that article. ---
**Author:** ![EdelweissPirate](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/8491ac/32.png) [@EdelweissPirate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdelweissPirate)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 5:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/104 "2020-05-04T05:51:19Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > the same a-hole added the l […] Speaking of assholes/arseholes, why complain about this when y’all can’t be arsed to pronounce your own Rs? 🙂 I get that most U.K. accents are non-rhotic. But there’s plenty of latitude here on both sides. Also, non-rhotic rubs me the wrong way; shouldn’t it be arhotic if we’re being true to the Greek (which gave us the letter rho)? Go-go gadget alpha privative! Oh; wait! That’s a near-homophone in most US English accents for “erotic.” Maybe these things are happenstance, yeah? Anyone demanding linguistic purity from English is sure to be disappointed, non? ---
**Author:** ![SanVito](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sanvito/32/2805_2.png) [@SanVito](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SanVito)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 1:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/105 "2020-05-04T13:07:06Z")
Always interested to see how popular pronunciation threads are on The Dope. Of course, we’re all right, or wrong, depending on where we are at the time. Except for Math. It’s MATH **S** you heathens. Math makes you sound like you’ve got a lisp. ---
**Author:** ![Crafter\_Man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crafter_man/32/458_2.png) [@Crafter\_Man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crafter_Man)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/106 "2020-05-04T13:57:07Z")
I used to subscribe to Nuts & Volts magazine. It was full of cool electronics projects you could build. I nicknamed the magazine **Solder of Fortune**. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Mark\_Finn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@Mark\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mark_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/107 "2020-05-04T13:58:08Z")
Montreal/Quebec area - always “sodder”. “Route” is always pronounced “Root”, and “chamois” is pronounced correctly the French way (rather than “shammy”). “Tomayto” and “Tomahto” are 50/50 in my experience. We “bay-ta” test, and I always use the silent “t” in “often”. When I order a “lemonade”, I get a non-carbonated lemon drink; in Australia or UK, I would get a fizzy, 7-Up type drink. There - I would have to order a “lemon squash” to get what I really wanted. ---
**Author:** ![Mark\_Finn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/34f0e0/32.png) [@Mark\_Finn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mark_Finn)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 2:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/108 "2020-05-04T14:01:35Z")
> [@Crafter\_Man](#): > > I used to subscribe to Nuts & Volts magazine. It was full of cool electronics projects you could build. I nicknamed the magazine **Solder of Fortune**. 😛 Reminds me of a petroleum industry magazine that my father used to subscribe to. It had a page of humor titled “Crude and Refined”. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/109 "2020-05-04T19:54:13Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > It’s also a class shibboleth in England. Middle and upper classes tend to say gar-ahge, as the Yanks, while working class oiks pronounce it garridge. There’s also something of a Norh-South split. As you say, there’s no consistency in these things, nor should there be. That’s half the fun of language. Not quite. The class-based UK pronunciation of garage has the stress on the first syllable, and the second g is like the g in George. Not the same as US garage. ---
**Author:** ![robardin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/43a26b/32.png) [@robardin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robardin)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/110 "2020-05-05T13:13:31Z")
> [@Morgenstern](#): > > Same with Beta > > US: Baa’ta testing > UK Bee’ta testing. This reminds me of the latest startling US/UK pronunciation divide I’ve encountered in the wild: I was watching one of those “Today I Found Out” videos on YouTube (which channel I subscribe to), usually narrated by a Englishman named Simon Whistler (a Yorkshireman, apparently). He offhandedly mentioned having technical difficulties while working from home to make the videos during this COVID-19 lockdown that required swapping in a new “ethernet” cable. Pronouncing “Eth” like in, I dunno, “Ethel”, or “Ethelred the Unready”. In America, at least in my part of it, “Ethernet” is pronounced as “ether” would be, the classically mysterious medium of transmission, or the thing with the knockout fumes… “EE-ther”… Which I think is also the UK pronunciation, unless too is “ethel” ether there? “Ether” as a standalone word comes up a lot less frequently, but I use and have used the word “ethernet” a LOT in the past 30 years, and cannot recall ever, ever hearing it pronounced that way until yesterday. The first use of the word “ether” on its own that comes to my mind is from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which opens with the lines, “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table”. So would Eliot, an American who settled in Britain, have read this aloud as “ethhherized”? (In Googling the text, I see he spelled it with a Z instead of an S, so he was still American enough at that time, eh?) ---
**Author:** ![Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/439d5e/32.png) [@Some\_Call\_Me.Tim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Some_Call_Me.Tim)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/111 "2020-05-05T14:48:35Z")
> [@Suburban\_Plankton](#): > > How is it like aluminum? We pronounce all of the letters in ‘aluminum’ just as they are written. At least, I do…how do you pronounce it? While in the US we pronounce all the letters of ‘aluminum’, in the UK they pronounce all the letters of ‘aluminium’. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/112 "2020-05-05T15:26:25Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > It’s the “oo” part that is significant, not the “r” (which I agree does not exist.) Britons distinctly pronounce the U (“pyoomah”), rather than saying “poomah”. The same thing happens with _jaguar_. I don’t know if it’s cat related. I thought it had been already established that Brits tend to change the pronunciations of foreign loan words to match what they think the spelling suggests as if it were originally an English word, where Americans try to keep the pronunciations as close as possible to their foreign origins. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 8:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/113 "2020-05-05T20:26:55Z")
> [@BwanaBob](#): > > I thought it had been already established that Brits tend to change the pronunciations of foreign loan words to match what they think the spelling suggests as if it were originally an English word, where Americans try to keep the pronunciations as close as possible to their foreign origins. I doubt if that’s true in general. Americans are just as prone as Britons to pronounce Paris with an s, Mexico with an x, Montreal with a t, chantilly with n and l sounds. There may be a small number of words where the American pronunciation more closely approximates the language of origin, but there are counter-examples too (such as the word foyer). ---
**Author:** ![TwoCarrotSnowman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/twocarrotsnowman/32/15879_2.png) [@TwoCarrotSnowman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TwoCarrotSnowman)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/114 "2020-05-05T22:41:57Z")
> [@robardin](#): > > This reminds me of the latest startling US/UK pronunciation divide I’ve encountered in the wild: > > I was watching one of those “Today I Found Out” videos on YouTube (which channel I subscribe to), usually narrated by a Englishman named Simon Whistler (a Yorkshireman, apparently). He offhandedly mentioned having technical difficulties while working from home to make the videos during this COVID-19 lockdown that required swapping in a new “ethernet” cable. Pronouncing “Eth” like in, I dunno, “Ethel”, or “Ethelred the Unready”. > > In America, at least in my part of it, “Ethernet” is pronounced as “ether” would be, the classically mysterious medium of transmission, or the thing with the knockout fumes… “EE-ther”… Which I think is also the UK pronunciation, unless too is “ethel” ether there? > > “Ether” as a standalone word comes up a lot less frequently, but I use and have used the word “ethernet” a LOT in the past 30 years, and cannot recall ever, ever hearing it pronounced that way until yesterday. > > The first use of the word “ether” on its own that comes to my mind is from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which opens with the lines, “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table”. So would Eliot, an American who settled in Britain, have read this aloud as “ethhherized”? (In Googling the text, I see he spelled it with a Z instead of an S, so he was still American enough at that time, eh?) I’m British, and I’ve only ever heard “eeth-er-net” (and I work in an IT department in Yorkshire). ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2020, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/115 "2020-05-05T22:46:17Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > Concur with the other Canucks – I have never heard the “l” pronounced – it is always “sodder” (or “sauder”), as in the US. > > Canadian spelling tends to follow the British orthography, but pronunciation is more closely aligned with the US. Though there are notable differences in words like “about” and “sorry”. Not to mention “leftenant” and “shedule”. And the final letter of the alphabet. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2020, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/116 "2020-05-06T03:36:29Z")
> [@Bones\_Daley](#): > > I am hoping that some Canadian, Oz, African etc members will chip in and reveal what their preferred pronunciation is, as well as anyone for whom English is a second language. The university students in melb.vic.au laughed (in a fairly good natured way) at my dad’s American pronunciation of “soldering iron” ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2020, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/117 "2020-05-06T09:08:56Z")
Sorry. Posting tired. ---
**Author:** ![BwanaBob](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bwanabob/32/2985_2.png) [@BwanaBob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BwanaBob)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2020, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/118 "2020-05-11T13:19:38Z")
> [@hibernicus](#): > > I doubt if that’s true in general. Americans are just as prone as Britons to pronounce Paris with an s, Mexico with an x, Montreal with a t, chantilly with n and l sounds. There may be a small number of words where the American pronunciation more closely approximates the language of origin, but there are counter-examples too (such as the word foyer). You’re referring to city names. Whole different set of rules. I’m talking about “things”. But i think I’ve found a pattern in that in the UK they mostly pronounce the French loan words closer to the actual French, and that its Spanish/Italian words they absorb and use pronunciations based on English norms. Some examples: chaise longue, escargot, chateau, bouillabaisse - correct Taco, pasta, jaguar, puma - ungodly wrong ‘chaise longue’ and ‘bouillabaisse’ are one we Americans butcher. ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Passing\_Through](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Just\_Passing\_Through](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Passing_Through)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2020, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/119 "2020-05-11T13:43:58Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > Not to mention “leftenant” and “shedule”. And the final letter of the alphabet. And the number zero, as in Top Gear’s “naught to sixty” races. ---
**Author:** ![Mallard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b9bd4f/32.png) [@Mallard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mallard)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2020, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/120 "2020-05-11T16:35:10Z")
> [@Bones\_Daley](#): > > I am hoping that some Canadian, Oz, African etc members will chip in and reveal what their preferred pronunciation is, as well as anyone for whom English is a second language. I’m in Western Canada and have never personally heard anything other than “sodder” for “solder”. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [May 11, 2020, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997/121 "2020-05-11T18:03:31Z")
> [@Just\_Passing\_Through](#): > > And the number zero, as in Top Gear’s “naught to sixty” races. Nought in British English, not naught. Not sure how that fits with British English pronunciations of words, though - it’s just a word that’s used slightly more commonly in the UK than the US. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997.md?page=5) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-the-us-pronunciation-of-solder-unique-to-the-us/697997.md?page=7)