# UK pronunciation: urinals **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 3, 2020, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-pronunciation-urinals/850924 "2020-04-03T01:37:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2020, 9:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-pronunciation-urinals/850924/21 "2020-04-06T09:21:56Z")
> [@smithsb](#): > > Does this pronunciation guide apply to the planet YourANus as well? 😃 Some pernickety people pronounce it as YOU-ranous, which of course then sounds like “urinous”, which could be a source of confusion. ---
**Author:** ![Bear\_Nenno](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bear_nenno/32/3358_2.png) [@Bear\_Nenno](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bear_Nenno)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2020, 12:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-pronunciation-urinals/850924/22 "2020-04-06T12:21:57Z")
> [@Keeve](#): > > In case there are any Brits reading this who can’t figure out what the question is… We Yanks pronounce it YOO-ri-nal Where do people in the US pronounce it like that? I pronounce it as EUR-uh-nul (IPA: ˈyʊər ə nl), and have never heard it pronounced differently. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2020, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-pronunciation-urinals/850924/23 "2020-04-06T15:09:59Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > Some pernickety people pronounce it as YOU-ranous, which of course then sounds like “urinous”, which could be a source of confusion. Some guidance from someone who actually knows something about Greek would help, but for the God at least, wouldn’t the stress fall on the _final_ syllable? ETA I suppose you would get the first syllable stress after latinizing it (Ouranos -\> Uranus) ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2020, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-pronunciation-urinals/850924/24 "2020-04-07T01:43:49Z")
> [@Novelty\_Bobble](#): > > Sure, but dictionaries are not a good place to find out how the british people you meet should actually speak. They are descriptive, not proscriptive. At some point the definitions, spellings and pronunciations in dictionaries can change according to the real-life usage. The fact that dictionaries are descriptive rather than proscriptive means that they should, in fact, indicate how people do actually speak, and so in principle they should be a good place to find this out. But this ideal is difficult to realise in practice for two reasons. First, most languages, and certainly British English, accommodate a wide variety of regional and/or class accents. A dictionary of manageable size can only go so far in documenting these. Most plump for a particular accent which is generally seen as somewhat normative and focus on documenting that. But of course designating any particular regional or class accent as normative is itself a controversial exercise. Secondly, as you point out, dictionaries can only capture pronunciation at a point in time, whereas pronunciation is always shifting. So what the OED records as the dominant pronunciation may have been the dominant pronunciation when the entry was written or last edited, but it may not be today. Still, if we are looking for information about pronunciation which is more than purely anecdotal, the OED and similar resources are pretty much all we have. And they do attempt to be systematic. I know - because you have told me - that you assign the same sound to the first syllable in _Europe_ and to _youth_. But I don’t know whether this is the vowel sound from \*cure \*or the vowel sound from \*goose \*(or something else). Or are these also the same vowel sound for you? For me, \*Europe \*goes with \*cure \*and \*youth \*goes with _goose_, as the OED indicates. Which is ironic, since I’m not even British. > [@Novelty\_Bobble](#): > > I don’t accept that there is such a thing as a “standard” British English accent that is commonplace in real life. I agree. The OED approach dates from an era when, for class and other reasons, a signficant number of people in Britain - well, in England, anyway - were prepared to accept that a particular accent was normative, even though it wasn’t the accent they themselves had. That time has passed. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/uk-pronunciation-urinals/850924.md?page=1)