Talk:lawyer

Pronunciation

Can we get a source for the idea that the American English pronunciation is strongly and generally disyllabic? It certainly sounds more like the OED's monosyllabic version (albeit more rhotic) to me. — LlywelynII 08:27, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

The OED has a disyllabic pronunciation. Compare lawyer /ˈlɔɪə(r)/ with its minimal partner loir /lɔɪə(r)/, and also the fact that hyphenation dictionaries have law·yer (as indeed do we). Like many dictionaries, the OED does not mark stress on monosyllabic words, even those which are stressed, and so uses the stress mark to distinguish these two pronunciation. Same convention in flower vs flour, etc. (Yes, this is not phonetic, but then neither is the convention of using the stress mark on unstressed syllables to distinguish non-reduced vowels.) This is covered in the OED pronunciation guide. kwami (talk) 22:14, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

For /aɪ̯r/ and /aʊ̯r/ monosyllabic pronunciations are certainly heard in English. Some people do distinguish between "hire" and "higher", while others don't. However, I'm not aware of monosyllabic */oɪ̯r/, and neither monosyllabic */eɪ̯r/ or */oʊ̯r/. There are simply no such words. So even if someone said "lawyer" in one syllable, e.g. in fast speech, this would be phonemically irrelevant. 178.4.151.88 07:17, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

Missing sense: various plants, or part of a plant

Chambers 1908 defines this as "the stem of a briar" (meaning a brambly plant, not a smoker's briar pipe). It also seems to have been applied to various plants, noted e.g. in Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages by Edward Ellis Morris:

One of the English provincial uses of this word is for a thorny stem of a briar or bramble. In New Zealand, the name is used in this sense for the Rubus australis, N.O. Rosaceae, or Wild Raspberry-Vine (Maori, Tataramoa). The words Bush-Lawyer, Lawyer-Vine, and Lawyer-Palm, are used with the same signification, and are also applied in some colonies to the Calamus australis, Mart. (called also Lawyer-Cane) and to Flagellaria indica, Linn., similar trailing plants.

Equinox ◑ 18:53, 22 April 2020 (UTC)