Word.ws English Dictionary

wine-whine merger

Syllables: wine·whine·mer·gerUK/waɪnˈwaɪn ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia/wɑenˈwɑen ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/

wine-whine merger noun: a merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a Scottish accent or several accents in the United States) becomes [w] (the sound heard at the beginning of the word wine); in accents where this merger occurs, whine and wine are homophones.

Noun

wine-whine merger (plural wine-whine mergers)

  1. A merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a Scottish accent or several accents in the United States) becomes [w] (the sound heard at the beginning of the word wine); in accents where this merger occurs, whine and wine are homophones.
    • As was the case with the wine–whine merger, date from the early twentieth century show that southeastern Pennsylvania was subject to patterns of variation in pronunciation.2016, Mark L. Louden, Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language, page 228
    • Chambers (2002) graphs the trajectory of the wine-whine merger in four reigions preserving ʍ.2019, Keiko Bridwell, “Previous Research on the Wine-Whine Merger”, in The Distribution of ʍ, page 7

Forms of wine-whine merger

pluralwine-whine mergers

Questions about wine-whine merger

What does wine-whine merger mean?
Wine-whine merger means a merger in which [ʍ] (the voiceless sound heard at the beginning of the word whine in a Scottish accent or several accents in the United States) becomes [w] (the sound heard at the beginning of the word wine); in accents where this merger occurs, whine and wine are homophones.
What part of speech is wine-whine merger?
Wine-whine merger is a noun.
How do you pronounce wine-whine merger?
Wine-whine merger is pronounced /wɑenˈwɑen ˌmɜːdʒə(ɹ)/ (Australia).
What is the plural of wine-whine merger?
The plural of wine-whine merger is wine-whine mergers.

Words near wine-whine merger in the dictionary

  1. wine-presses
  2. wine-shop
  3. wine-shops
  4. wine-tree
  5. wine-trees
  6. wine-whine merger
  7. wine-whine mergers
  8. winearita
  9. winearitas
  10. winebag
  11. winebags

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wine-whine 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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