Creating an account only takes 20 seconds, and doesn’t require any personal info.

If you’ve got one already, please log in.🤝

⟨oo⟩

From Teflpedia

⟨oo⟩ is an unsplit vowel digraph consisting of a double O.

There are two ways in which this is pronounced; as the ꜰᴏᴏᴛ vowel phoneme /ʊ/ or the ɢᴏᴏꜱᴇ vowel phoneme /uː/. In some accents, these are merged as the ꜰᴏᴏᴛ–ɢᴏᴏꜱᴇ merger.

⟨oor⟩ and ⟨ool⟩ are dealt with separately.

Table[edit | edit source]

Phoneme Example words Notes
ɢᴏᴏꜱᴇ vowel phoneme /uː/
  1. boom, boost, boot, brood, choose, coot, crooner, doom, droop, food, fool, hoop, hoot, loop, loose, mood, moon, moose, moot, noon, proof, root, schooner, scoop, shoot, soon, spook, snooker, snooze, stool, stoop, toot, tooth, troop, zoom
  2. bamˈboo, boo, ˈcuckoo /ˈkʊkuː/, ˈigloo, kangaˈroo, moo, shamˈpoo, shoo, taˈboo, tatˈtoo, too, ˈvoodoo, ˈWaterloo or Waterˈloo, zoo
Set 2 has ⟨oo⟩ at the ends of words.
ꜰᴏᴏᴛ vowel phoneme /ʊ/
  1. With following /d/: childhood, good, hood, neighborhoodAmE, neighbourhoodBrE, stood, understood, wood
  2. With following /k/: book, brook, cook, crook, hook, look, rook, shook, took
  3. With following /t/: foot, soot
Never occurs at the ends of words.
Either ɢᴏᴏꜱᴇ or ꜰᴏᴏᴛ, depending on accent
  1. With following /f/: hoof, roof
  2. With following /m/: broom, groom, room
ɢᴏᴀᴛ vowel brooch Only exception

Variant pronunciations[edit | edit source]

In the 1920s and earlier, the more usual pronunciation of room was probably /rʊm/. In the United Kingdom in 1988, 81% pronounced /ruːm/. In the United States in 1993 the figure was higher: 93%.[1]

Other examples: bedroom, blooming (swear word), broom, groom, hoof[2], mushroom, roof[3], room, roomy, root (only as a variant in American English)[4]

Different syllables[edit | edit source]

⟨oo⟩ superficially occurs across syllable boundaries, in which case it’s not a digraph. To avoid the appearance of a digraph, a hyphen is often used, e.g. co-operate, micro-organism, etc.

By orthographic convention, the pronoun no one is spelt as two different words, even though it functions as a single word. (*noone is a misspelling).

Homophones[edit | edit source]

  • root /ruːt, rʊtAmE/, route /ruːt, raʊtAmE/; shoe, shoo; too, two; wood, would;

References[edit | edit source]