Word.ws English Dictionary

father-bother merger

UK/ˌfɑːðə ˈbɒðə ˈmɜːdʒə/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

British/ˌfɑːðə ˈbɔðə ˈməːdʒə/

father-bother merger noun: a phonemic merger in English of the vowels /ɑː/ (as in father) and /ɒ/ (as in bother).

Noun

father-bother merger

  1. A phonemic merger in English of the vowels /ɑː/ (as in father) and /ɒ/ (as in bother).
    • The first is the father-bother merger, a loss of rounding contrast in the low back vowels by which the originally contrastive /ɒ/ has been subsumed by /ɑː/ into the fused phoneme /ɑ/.2018, Gregory H. Bontrager, “Ambisyllabicity in an Optimal-Theoretic Model of English Stress Assignment”, in Florida Linguistics Papers, volume 5, number 2

Questions about father-bother merger

What does father-bother merger mean?
Father-bother merger means a phonemic merger in English of the vowels /ɑː/ (as in father) and /ɒ/ (as in bother).
What part of speech is father-bother merger?
Father-bother merger is a noun.
How do you pronounce father-bother merger?
Father-bother merger is pronounced /ˌfɑːðə ˈbɒðə ˈmɜːdʒə/ (UK).

Words near father-bother merger in the dictionary

  1. Father Xmas
  2. Father Xmases
  3. Father Xmasses
  4. Father's Day
  5. Father's Days
  6. father-bother merger
  7. father-daughter day
  8. father-daughter days
  9. father-figure
  10. father-figures
  11. father-fucker

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: father-bother 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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