Word.ws English Dictionary

cot-caught merger

/ˈkɑt kɔt ˌmɝd͡ʒɚ/

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cot caught merger/ˈkɑt kɑt ˌmɝd͡ʒɚ/

cot-caught merger noun: a phonemic merger in some varieties of English (especially American, Canadian and Scottish English) in which the vowels in words such as hot and doll (/ɒ/) and in words such as law and talk (/ɔː/) are pronounced identically, making the words cot and caught homophones.

Noun

cot-caught merger (plural cot-caught mergers)

  1. A phonemic merger in some varieties of English (especially American, Canadian and Scottish English) in which the vowels in words such as hot and doll (/ɒ/) and in words such as law and talk (/ɔː/) are pronounced identically, making the words cot and caught homophones.
    • One was /au/-monophthongisation, described earlier in Chapter 2, while the second was the so-called low-back merger (LBM), also referred to as the cot–caught merger because words in these two classes are pronounced the same and speakers cannot hear any small differences in their pronunciation, even...2011, Scott F Kiesling, Linguistic Variation and Change, page 81
    Synonyms:
    low back merger

Synonyms of cot-caught merger

Forms of cot-caught merger

pluralcot-caught mergers

Questions about cot-caught merger

What does cot-caught merger mean?
Cot-caught merger means a phonemic merger in some varieties of English (especially American, Canadian and Scottish English) in which the vowels in words such as hot and doll (/ɒ/) and in words such as law and talk (/ɔː/) are pronounced identically, making the words cot and caught homophones.
What part of speech is cot-caught merger?
Cot-caught merger is a noun.
How do you pronounce cot-caught merger?
Cot-caught merger is pronounced /ˈkɑt kɔt ˌmɝd͡ʒɚ/ (US).
What is the plural of cot-caught merger?
The plural of cot-caught merger is cot-caught mergers.

Words near cot-caught merger in the dictionary

  1. cot
  2. cot death
  3. cot deaths
  4. cot-caught
  5. cot-caught merged
  6. cot-caught merger
  7. cot-caught mergers
  8. cot-quean
  9. cot-queans
  10. cota
  11. Cotabato

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cot-caught merger (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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