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

mafia

UK /ˈmæfi.ə/ · US /ˈmɑfi.ə/ noun, proper noun

Forms mafias the Mafia maffia

  1. noun A hierarchically structured secret organisation engaged in illegal activities like distribution of narcotics, gambling and extortion.
  2. noun A crime syndicate.
  3. noun A trusted group of associates, as of a political leader.
  4. noun (in compounds) An entity which attempts to control a specified arena by violence or threats. “moral mafia”
  5. proper noun The international criminal organization of Sicilian origin operating in Italy and the United States.
  6. proper noun Any other specific organized crime syndicate operating internationally in high-level organized crime; often with a modifying adjective, such as a nationality. “Somehow he managed to upset the Russian Mafia.”
  7. proper noun (games) A social deduction party game modelling a conflict between an informed minority (the mafia) and an uninformed majority (the innocents). Each player is secretly assigned a role within one of these teams, and the innocents attempt to identify the mafia members before they are all "murdered".

Synonyms

Mob Cosa Nostra Maffia Sicilian Mafia

Etymology

See Mafia. The sense "entity which attempts to control a specified arena" makes an analogy to crime-syndicate mafias' attempts to control certain kinds of business in the regions in which they exist.

Borrowed from Italian mafia, of uncertain origin. In the first instance, it is not clear whether the lemma in question is a Sicilian exonym or endonym, since written and oral sources on this term are scarce, the etymology remains uncertain and it's worthy of further investigation. It is possibly a regional term of the then recently established Kingdom of Italy; thus the meaning "spirit of hostility to the law" could be just derivative. The hypotheses put forward have been varied, but not very convincing from a reconstructive point of view. See Sicilian mafia for more. See, also, the Wikipedia article for more discussion of the origin of the word. Doublet of mafiya.

Webster’s 1913

  1. noun A secret society which organized in Sicily as a political organization, but is now widespread among Italians, and is used to further or protect private interests, reputedly by illegal methods.

Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “mafia”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details