While my first love is weird and obscure words, there's a lot more to the English language. Since 2006, I have been doing a series of short pronunciation polls. In some ways, this idea was based on the larger, more complex Harvard Dialect Survey run by Bert Vaux for many years. The results of my polls aren't really scientific at all, and reflect the pronunciations of a self-selected group who decided to fill out the poll - a group which you should feel free to join!

To fill out the polls, you must get a free Livejournal account, which makes it hard to skew the results by filling the poll out multiple times. There are no right or wrong answers - in some cases, the standard pronunciations found in dictionaries are rarely heard. Each poll must be submitted separately using the 'Submit Poll' button below the entry. Once you have filled out a poll, its results become visible to you. Feel free to comment on any of the polls by clicking 'Leave a comment'. Following the initial responses to each poll, I will write up an analysis of the responses, along with some commentary on the features of English linguistics that make these particular terms so interesting.

• Once you've filled out all the polls, you can see the analysis entries (along with the completed polls) by following this link.
• For a post with an index of all the polls to date, along with the analytical essays, go to this page.
• To help improve my analyses, please fill out my dialect survey poll here.

I hope you have found this site to be useful. If you have any corrections, additions, or comments, please contact me. Please note that I am not able to respond to all requests. Please consult a major dictionary before e-mailing your query. All material on this page © 2007 Stephen Chrisomalis. Links to this page may be made without permission.