4 Comments

  1. Is tire a one syllable word, indeed. It all depends on exactly how you manipulate that R phoneme in your mouth. (Consider the southerners, for whom tire would rhyme with far – like the three wise men who were scorched 'cause they came from a-far.)
    Depending on the dictionary, "squirrel" is sometimes considered the longest one-syllable word, just in case that comes up in a trivia contest… or in a baiku, since squirrels happen to bicycles, too.
    I remember discussions about this stuff with my reading specialist buddies and then we'd snicker (well, some of us would) because it wasn't as if our students could hear the difference between tie – er and tar…

  2. Is tire a one syllable word, indeed. It all depends on exactly how you manipulate that R phoneme in your mouth. (Consider the southerners, for whom tire would rhyme with far – like the three wise men who were scorched 'cause they came from a-far.) Depending on the dictionary, "squirrel" is sometimes considered the longest one-syllable word, just in case that comes up in a trivia contest… or in a baiku, since squirrels happen to bicycles, too. I remember discussions about this stuff with my reading specialist buddies and then we'd snicker (well, some of us would) because it wasn't as if our students could hear the difference between tie – er and tar…

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