Talk:ugh

We really need more articles to have pronunciation listed (strangely this is a perfect situation to say "ugh"). According to Wikipedia's IPA help the consonant sound on this word is /x/, so I'm pretty sure the pronunciation is either /əx/ or /ʌx/, though I suspect that with the way English dialects work it is also /əg/ or /ʌg/. I'll add a pronunciation section now, but I have more important things to do (schoolwork) so I won't be searching around that many dictionaries to check the pronunciation, so please correct me if I put in the wrong pronunciation.Scotty Zebulon 01:00, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I've looked in the Cambridge English Pronunciation Dictionary, which has multiple pronunciations. Some of their pronunciations match what you've indicated, but there are also pronunciations given there with IPA symbols I've not seen used before for transcription of any English word. --EncycloPetey 01:04, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Wow, that was fast! I was taking several minutes to add the pronunciation section and the three dictionaries I looked at had some interesting pronunciations, one claimed something like simply /ə/ as one of the pronunciations (though not using IPA to show it), that same dictionary also showed something I believe would be /ʊx/ (that dictionary is part of MSN Encarta, and their pronunciation representation system has a chart that actually has blank spots on a lot of the left column, where it should have representation thingies shown) and something apparently being /əg/. I think the pronunciation section should include as many of the identified pronunciations as possible, though I think the IPA template only allows for four, now I've got to immediately begin doing what I should've been doing thirty minutes ago, my assignment for English class.Scotty Zebulon 01:30, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

"Ugh" is a conventional representation of an exclamation which is not part of the language's phonemic system. Other such conventional representations include "tsk tsk" or "tut tut"; "atchoo"; "pshaw"; "phew". Other approximations to different species of the same genus as this particular exclamation include "yuck", "eeuw", "yech", etc. A careful spelling-pronunciation of any particular item misses the point and defeats the purpose; unless done deliberately for jocular effect. Jnestorius 07:32, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

None of the pronunciations listed here seem to match with anything I've ever heard. What I think of as the normal pronunciation is approximately /ʊːə/; I'm not sure how to transcribe it more accurately. But it seems online dictionaries disagree on the matter: Cambridge gives it in IPA as either /ʊx/ or /ɜː/, but the audio pronunciations there are both /ʌg/. OTOH, Oxford has it as /əː/ (audio sounds to me more like a cross between /ʊ/ and /ɜ/) or /ʌx/ (audio seems to agree).

I suppose what it goes to show is that there's no universally agreed pronunciation. But at the very least, /ʌg/ seems to be a spelling pronunciation - I can't imagine it having much actual use. Do the people who recorded it for the Cambridge dictionary really pronunce it this way?

So the question is: How can we better capture the range of pronunciations of this interjection? A good start would be to include some of the pronunciations that have no consonant sounds in them. But I'm not sure whether /ʊːə/ is a sufficiently close transcription of how I think of it, or what other pronunciations I've found are accurate. — Smjg (talk) 18:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)