Klryz
Pronunciation guide: IPA symbols, stress and word endings

Vowels

iːseeɪsite / ɛbedæcat
ɑːfatherɒhot (UK)ɔːlawʊput
uːtooʌcupɜːbirdəabout
eɪdayaɪmyɔɪboyaʊnow
əʊ / oʊgo (UK / US)ɪəneareəhairʊətour

Consonants that look unusual

θthinðthisʃsheʒmeasure
tʃchurchdʒjudgeŋsingjyes

p b t d k g f v s z h m n l r w sound as in ordinary English spelling.

Marks

  • ˈ main stress, before the stressed syllable: /ˈwɔːtə/ water · ˌ lighter (secondary) stress: /ˌʌndəˈstænd/ understand
  • ː a long vowel · (r) an r said only in accents that pronounce it (most American, Scottish, Irish)

Common word endings

  • -s / -es (plurals; he/she form of verbs): /s/ after voiceless sounds (cats), /z/ after voiced (dogs), /ɪz/ after s, z, sh, ch, j sounds (buses, watches). Spelling: -es after s, x, z, ch, sh; consonant + y → -ies (city → cities).
  • -ed (past): /t/ after voiceless sounds (walked), /d/ after voiced (played), /ɪd/ after t or d (wanted). Spelling: love → loved, stop → stopped, carry → carried.
  • -ing: make → making, run → running, see → seeing.
  • Irregular: go, went, gone · be, was, been · see, saw, seen · man → men · child → children · mouse → mice.
  • Older (King James) forms: -eth = -s (he loveth = he loves) · -est with “thou” (thou lovest) · spake = spoke.

English Dictionary · 107,383 entries · Sources & licences

black hole

UK /blæk ˈhəʊl/ · US /blæk ˈhoʊl/ noun, verb

Forms black holes black holing black holed black-hole blackhole

  1. noun A place of punitive confinement; a lockup or cell; a military guardroom.
  2. noun (physics) A region of spacetime that exerts a gravitational pull strong enough that no matter or energy, not even light, can escape it.
  3. noun (figuratively) A void into which things disappear for good; an inscrutable area or subject.
  4. noun (aviation) A dangerous optical illusion that can occur on a nighttime approach with dark, featureless terrain between the aircraft and a brightly-lit runway, where the aircraft appears to the pilots to be higher up than it actually is, potentially triggering a premature or overly-steep descent and a crash short of the runway.
  5. noun (Internet, often attributive) A place where incoming traffic is silently discarded. “One way of fighting spam is to use a blackhole list maintained on a blackhole server.”
  6. noun (programming) A bit bucket; a place of permanent oblivion for data.
  7. verb (transitive, Internet) To redirect (network traffic, etc.) nowhere; to discard (incoming traffic).

Antonyms

white hole

Etymology

In reference to the physical concept (region of spacetime with extreme gravitational pull), physicist Hong-Yee Chiu attributed the term to his colleague Robert H. Dicke, who stated around 1960–1961 that the objects were like the Black Hole of Calcutta. The first known usage in print was by journalist Ann Ewing in 1964. Widespread popularization of the term is generally credited to a lecture in 1967 by the physicist John Wheeler.

Webster’s 1913

  1. A dungeon or dark cell in a prison; a military lock-up or guardroom; --now commonly with allusion to the cell (the Black Hole) in a fort at Calcutta, into which 146 English prisoners were thrust by the nabob Suraja Dowla on the night of June 20, 17656, and in which 123 of the prisoners died before morning from lack of air. A discipline of unlimited autocracy, upheld by rods, and ferules, and the black hole. H. Spencer.

Sources: Wiktionary · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “black hole”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details