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

quiz

/kwɪz/ noun, verb

Forms quizzes quizzing quizzed

  1. noun (dated) An odd, puzzling or absurd person or thing.
  2. noun (dated) One who questions or interrogates; a prying person.
  3. noun A competition in the answering of questions. “We came second in the pub quiz.”
  4. noun (education) A school examination of less importance, or of greater brevity, than others given in the same course.
  5. verb (transitive, archaic) To hoax; to chaff or mock with pretended seriousness of discourse; to make sport of, as by obscure questions.
  6. verb (transitive, archaic) To peer at; to eye suspiciously or mockingly.
  7. verb (transitive) To question (someone) closely, to interrogate. “He quizzed the suspect for around half an hour.”
  8. verb (transitive) To instruct (someone) by means of a quiz.
  9. verb (transitive, obsolete, rare) To play with a quiz.

Synonyms

test

Etymology

Attested since the 1780s, of unknown origin.
* The Century Dictionary suggests it was originally applied to a popular toy, from a dialectal variant of whiz.
* The Random House Dictionary suggests the original sense was "odd person" (circa 1780).
* Others suggest the meaning "hoax" was original (1796), shifting to the meaning "interrogate" (1847) under the influence of question and inquisitive.
* Some say without evidence it was invented by a late-18th-century Dublin theatre proprietor who bet he could add a new nonsense word to the English language; he had the word painted on walls all over the city, and the morning after, everyone was talking about it (The Pre-Victorian Drama in Dublin).
* Others suggest it was originally quies (1847), Latin qui es? (who are you?), traditionally the first question in oral Latin exams. They suggest that it was first used as a noun from 1867, and the spelling quiz first recorded in 1886, but this is demonstrably incorrect.
* A further derivation, assuming that the original sense is "good, ingenuous, harmless man, overly conventional, pedantic, rule-bound man, square; nerd; oddball, eccentric", is based on a column from 1785 which claims that the origin is a jocular translation of the Horace quotation vir bonus est quis as "the good man is a quiz" at Cambridge.

Webster’s 1913

  1. noun A riddle or obscure question; an enigma; a ridiculous hoax.
  2. noun One who quizzes others; as, he is a great quiz.
  3. verb To puzzle; to banter; to chaff or mock with pretended seriousness of discourse; to make sport of, as by obscure questions.
  4. verb To peer at; to eye suspiciously or mockingly.

Etymology [It is said that Daly, the manager of a Dublin playhouse, laid a wager that a new word of no meaning should be the common talk and puzzle of the city in twenty-fours. In consequence of this the letters q u i z were chalked by him on all the walls of Dublin, with an effect that won the wager. Perhaps, however, originally a variant of whiz, and formerly the name of a popular game.]

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