Word.ws English Dictionary

horse-hoarse merger

UK/hɔːs ˈhɔːs ˌmɜːdʒə/US/hoɹs ˈhoɹs ˌmɝdʒɚ/

horse-hoarse merger noun: a phonemic merger of /ɔɹ/ and /oɹ/, so that pairs of words such as horse and hoarse, war and wore, for and four, etc become homophones.

Noun

horse-hoarse merger

  1. A phonemic merger of /ɔɹ/ and /oɹ/, so that pairs of words such as horse and hoarse, war and wore, for and four, etc become homophones.
    • Among the changes, which took place in Dublin English in the 1990s (Hickey 1999), are the following four which are also found in general forms of American English: (a) use of retroflex /r/, in fork [fo:ɻk]; (b) use of an intervocalic alveolar tap, for example in water [wɑɾɚ]; (c) the...2017 August 9, Raymond Hickey, “Irish English in the Anglophone world”, in World Englishes, volume 36, number 2

Questions about horse-hoarse merger

What does horse-hoarse merger mean?
Horse-hoarse merger means a phonemic merger of /ɔɹ/ and /oɹ/, so that pairs of words such as horse and hoarse, war and wore, for and four, etc become homophones.
What part of speech is horse-hoarse merger?
Horse-hoarse merger is a noun.
How do you pronounce horse-hoarse merger?
Horse-hoarse merger is pronounced /hoɹs ˈhoɹs ˌmɝdʒɚ/ (US).

Words near horse-hoarse merger in the dictionary

  1. horse-godmother
  2. horse-godmothers
  3. horse-head fiddle
  4. horse-head fiddles
  5. horse-heal
  6. horse-hoarse merger
  7. horse-hung
  8. horse-jockey
  9. horse-jockeys
  10. horse-latitudes
  11. horse-leech

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: horse-hoarse 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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