How do you say Towcester?
Ten British place names. Four spellings of the sound, one of them marked right. Wrong turns are part of the game.
How do you pronounce Towcester, Cirencester, Kirkcudbright and 20 more?
Every name in the game, in alphabetical order, with the pronunciation the quiz marks as right and where it comes from. In the respellings, capitals mark the stressed syllable. OW is as in “cow”, OH as in “go”, AY as in “day”, UU as in “book”, and DH is the th of “this”.
Where the pronunciations come from
- The answer marked right for each name is the pronunciation printed in its Wikipedia article. Where the article gives only IPA (Happisburgh, Mousehole, Slaithwaite, St Neots), the respelling is this page’s own reading of it. Happisburgh is the one case where the key leans on another source: the parish council and the village website give “Haze-bruh”, two syllables, while Wikipedia’s IPA has three, so both forms are shown. Where the article cites the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names or another reference, the table says so. The dictionary is lend-only online, so its entries were read through Wikipedia’s citation, not in the book.
- All 23 names have a second source that was opened and read for this page: a dictionary, a council or parish site, a regional newspaper, a travel guide, a local history society, a county directory or a reference book. Each is named in the table.
- The three wrong answers on each question are invented as plausible mistakes. Each was checked against the Wikipedia article, the second sources and Wiktionary, so that no wrong answer is a pronunciation any of them gives for that place.
- Some names have more than one accepted form (Holborn, Marylebone, Cirencester, Slaithwaite, Happisburgh, Woolfardisworthy). The quiz marks one as right, shows the other form in the reveal, and never offers it as a wrong answer.
- Marylebone is the least settled: Pronunciation Studio calls the right answer “a mystery” and lists six forms. The quiz marks Wikipedia’s usual form, MAR-lib-un, and keeps every listed form out of the wrong answers.
- Woolfardisworthy is the name of two Devon villages. The BBC and The Spectator give Woolsery for the larger one, near Bideford, and Visit Mid Devon, the tourism site run by Mid Devon District Council, says the one near Crediton is “actually pronounced Woolsery”. The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, as Wikipedia cites it, gives the Crediton village a spelled-out form. The quiz marks Woolsery, and the spelled-out form is not offered as a wrong answer.
- Slaithwaite is contested in print. The Guardian says inhabitants call it “slou-wit”, Yorkshire Live gives “slath-wait” or “sla-wit”, and in July 2023 Northern said it would re-record its announcements as “Slou-Wit”. The quiz marks SLOW-it.
- Place-name facts in the reveals come from the same Wikipedia articles, except where a reveal names another source.