Word.ws English Dictionary

cot-caught mergers

cot-caught mergers is the plural of cot-caught merger.

Meaning of cot-caught merger

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

Questions about cot-caught mergers

What is cot-caught mergers the plural of?
Cot-caught mergers is the plural of cot-caught merger.

Words near cot-caught mergers in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cot-caught mergers (page history and authors); 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “cot-caught mergers.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cot-caught_mergers. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.