Why do we write "women" but pronunce "weemen"? where does the pronunciation of the letter "o" vanish?
by 
joedraco
ANSWERS: 9
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I dont know how you get wee man.....I pronounce it woomen...guess it depends on your accent..;)
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The o in women used to have a indication for a dipthong above it, but people grew too lazy to put it over the o ... now we just eliminate it and pronounce women according to the local dialect.
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I pronounce the o.
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I've never heard it pronounced like 'wee-men' before : D Here it's 'woo-man' (same sound as in 'took') or 'wih-men' (same sound as in 'win')
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I hear it as wimmen!
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Outside a badly acted Mexican bandito movie, I've never heard it pronounced Wee-man. I do tend to say Weh-men and can't say where the 'o' went, except that perhaps our minds fix on the 'e' in second syllable.
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I say woman with the o. Or wimmen as well. It depends on how I'm speaking.
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LMAO!! I pronounce it "wemmen" (plural of woman), which I pronounce "wuh-men" To reiterate what Gideon said, I think the "O" sound gets lost because of the "e" that makes it plural.
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I would imagine that, common with lots of English spellings, it was pronounced differently and that's why it's spelled that way. In Chaucer's day "Knight" was pronounced "ki-nig-it". "Women" was possibly prounouced "Woo-men". But language changes much faster than spelling does- "women" is now the standard way of writing a word with many pronunciations.
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