Word.ws English Dictionary

pin-pen merger

pin-pen merger noun: a phonemic merger where the vowels in "pin" and "pen" are pronounced the same before /n/ and /m/, making "pin" and "pen" homophones.

Noun

pin-pen merger

  1. A phonemic merger where the vowels in "pin" and "pen" are pronounced the same before /n/ and /m/, making "pin" and "pen" homophones.
    • Before we get to those, however, let us consider how we might discover a vowel merger taking place (and most work in this area has been on vowel merger or on conditioned vowel mergers, such as the pin–pen merger in the US south or the pool–pull merger in Utah, discussed below).2011, Scott F. Kiesling, Linguistic Variation and Change, page 141

Questions about pin-pen merger

What does pin-pen merger mean?
Pin-pen merger means a phonemic merger where the vowels in "pin" and "pen" are pronounced the same before /n/ and /m/, making "pin" and "pen" homophones.
What part of speech is pin-pen merger?
Pin-pen merger is a noun.

Words near pin-pen merger in the dictionary

  1. pin-headed
  2. pin-heads
  3. pin-hole
  4. pin-holes
  5. pin-money
  6. pin-pen merger
  7. pin-point
  8. pin-pointed
  9. pin-pointing
  10. pin-points
  11. pin-prick

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pin-pen 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-us-pin-pen merger.oga.

Cite this entry: “pin-pen merger.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pin-pen_merger. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.