# drawer [pronunciation]



## NickJunior

Hello Forum Members,

I want to ask about the pronunciation of the English word that means a box-shaped storage compartment.  It is written as "drawer", but when it is spoken, I only hear it as "draw".  Why is the suffix "er" dropped when spoken?


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## owlman5

NickJunior said:


> Why is the suffix "er" dropped when spoken?


It is easy to hear the _er _in many American accents, Nick. Something called _the rhotic r _is pretty common in the United States. Here is a definition for _rhoticity _in English:

*Rhoticity* in English is the pronunciation of the historical *rhotic* consonant /*r*/ in all contexts by speakers of certain varieties of English. ... In non-*rhotic* varieties, speakers no longer pronounce /*r*/ in postvocalic environments—that is, when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel.

If you want to hear a typical U.S. pronunciation of _drawer, _click this link, select _US _from the drop-down menu near the top of the page, and click the _listen _button. The sound of _er _is very clear to me when I listen to that pronunciation of _drawer._


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## kentix

It's not two syllables, it's just one. If you are listening for a second syllable, you won't hear it. Just listen for one syllable and an ending r.

I would write the sound as dror. Rhymes with "for" and has the same ending.


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## Chasint

In my version of British English, "draw" and "drawer" sound exactly the same.  Accents may vary.


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## entangledbank

In a typical BrE accent that is not rhotic, the two are the same. The ending _-er_ is pronounced [ə], but this is absorbed into the previous vowel.


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## dojibear

drawer - WordReference.com Dictionary of English

There are audioclips here, to show how it is spoken in different places. To me, the UK audiclip sounds like "draw". 

But the US audioclip does not drop the "er" part. 
It sounds like "dro-err" to me. There may be other AE speakers that say "dror". 

Some of the audioclips (US, Irish) sound like 2 syllables. Others sound like 1 syllable.


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## RM1(SS)

I've known Americans who very clearly said "draw," not "drawer."


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## kentix

Probably non-rhotic.


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## Anais Lee

Does the British pronunciation on this website sound like "draw" to you? I seem to hear the -er.

drawer


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## Wordy McWordface

No, it doesn't sound like "draw".  He clearly says "draw -uh". You can hear the non-rhotic _-er._


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## Anais Lee

Is this pronunciation standard?


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## boozer

Yes, it is standard, and if I had to say 'drawer' on its own, I would say it like this:
dro-uh
However, in normal connected speech there is no time to stop and add the '-uh' at the end. So the resulting word is what Chasint describes in post 4.


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## Wordy McWordface

It depends what you mean by "standard".  If you gathered together 10 British people with "standard" pronunciation and asked them all to say _drawer,_ you would probably hear 10 subtly different pronunciations.

Among speakers with non-rhotic accents, I think that relatively few people make the distinction between _draw_ and _drawer_, unless they're being ultra-careful and saying the word in isolation. The sample pronunciations in online dictionaries are often misleading: they are recordings of actors who've been asked to say a word carefully, clearly and in isolation, and this doesn't necessarily correspond to what happens to the word in connected speech. As Boozer says, in normal connected speech, the 'uh' is usually dropped. For example, if you say "He opened the drawer and took out a knife", it's virtually impossible to say an 'uh' before the 'and'.


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## boozer

Wordy McWordface said:


> For example, if you say "He opened the drawer and took out a knife", it's virtually impossible to say an 'uh' before the 'and'.


 How does one squeeze in there another schwa? 

Unless, of course, one decides to go for a connecting 'r'...


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## Wordy McWordface

boozer said:


> How does one squeeze in there another schwa?


You can't!


boozer said:


> Unless, of course, one decides to go for a connecting 'r'...


As in "droring"? 🙉


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## boozer

Wordy McWordface said:


> As in "droring"? 🙉


 No, that would be the intrusive 'r', not the connecting one 
As in:
dro-u*r*-un-tuk...


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## Wordy McWordface

dro-u*r*-un-tuk...  That doesn't sound unreasonable.


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## Anais Lee

Wordy McWordface said:


> It depends what you mean by "standard".  If you gathered together 10 British people with "standard" pronunciation and asked them all to say _drawer,_ you would probably hear 10 subtly different pronunciations.



Yes, it's hard to define what that means. English learners of the world try hard to emulate an RP accent, only to find it's spoken by only 2% of the British population. 

Thanks for your help!


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## se16teddy

Yes, I suspect that most English people say [drɔː], [drɔːə] and [drɔːwə] (and no doubt other variants) interchangeably, and mostly without noticing the difference.


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## Andygc

Wordy McWordface said:


> Among speakers with non-rhotic accents, I think that relatively few people make the distinction between _draw_ and _drawer_,


Which is probably why it is quite common to see posts in internet conversations that spell "drawer" as "draw" with the plural "draws".


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## Wordy McWordface

Anais Lee said:


> English learners of the world try hard to emulate an RP accent, only to find it's spoken by only 2% of the British population.



True, but even 2% is still quite a lot of people, and many of those are among the most influential people in the UK - leaders in academia and politics, for example. So their voices do get heard.

In addition to that, there are millions more people whose accents are fairly close to RP. Standard Southern British English is basically RP, but without the clipped, posh tone and a few of the refined-sounding vowels. A non-native would need to have a pretty keen ear for phonology to hear the difference between RP and SSBE.


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## dojibear

Anais Lee said:


> English learners of the world try hard to emulate an RP accent, only to find it's spoken by only 2% of the British population.





Wordy McWordface said:


> In addition to that, there are millions more people whose accents are fairly close to RP.


Consider two parts: speaking and listening (understanding).

If you speak RP, it seems likely that everyone in England will understand. It is like speaking "Standard American" (SA) in the US.

In the US, most accents are close enough to SA that if you learn it, you will understand most accents.
The same is probably true in England: if you learn RP, you will understand most accents.


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## boozer

dojibear said:


> The same is probably true in England: if you learn RP, you will understand most accents.


Decidedly not. 
If you learn RP, you will, however, understand just about any US accent.


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## Andygc

dojibear said:


> The same is probably true in England: if you learn RP, you will understand most accents.


You can't be serious. My wife speaks educated Hampshire/Wiltshire, which is not far away from RP. She struggles to understand Liverpuddlians, Tynesiders and Teessiders, and she is completely lost with full-on Glaswegians.


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## Wordy McWordface

dojibear said:


> If you speak RP, it seems likely that everyone in England will understand.



That is true. And not only "England", of course. Take a typical platoon in the British military. The commanding officer may well be an RP speaker, while the squaddies might have accents from all over the UK. The squaddies - from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland -  will all understand the the officer's RP without any problem.



dojibear said:


> if you learn RP, you will understand most accents.


That is not true at all! The commanding officer would probably struggle to understand the accents of the soldiers from Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow or Belfast, especially when they are talking among themselves.


_Crossposted with Andy. And no coincidence that we both used the term 'struggle' and both gave the same accents as examples. _


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## kentix

boozer said:


> If you learn RP, you will, however, understand just about any US accent.


And I doubt this is true either, especially for a non-native speaker. The main ones, sure, but there are others that are quite a bit more challenging.


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## boozer

kentix said:


> And I doubt this is true either, especially for a non-native speaker. The main ones, sure, but there are others that are quite a bit more challenging.


Possibly there are. So far I have not met an American that I have not been able to understand. Maybe I miss a word or two here and there at the beginning but if we sit down to talk, there is no question of any miscommunication or misunderstanding. Granted, most of the time I have no idea whether they are from Idaho or California. Or Canada, for that matter.  Anyone from Georgia could tell me they were born in New York and I would buy it immediately. But it is quite possible that there are incomprehensible accents - America is so big.

At the same time, I have met any number of Brits with accents so impossible that... But they usually revert to [what is to me] normal English when they see the blank look on my face. 

In truth, on rare occasions I struggle to understand people speaking Bulgarian. And unlike America, mine is a small country.


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## kentix

The question is where have you met them?


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## Roxxxannne

RM1(SS) said:


> I've known Americans who very clearly said "draw," not "drawer."


I currently know Americans who say 'draw.'  They were born and raised in Massachusetts and Maine.


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## Keith Bradford

Historical note: there are two different words written as "drawer".

The sliding part of a storage unit, as in chest of drawers, pronounced /drɔ:/ to rhyme with _score_.
A person who draws (pictures or beer) pronounced /drɔ:ə/ or /drɔ:rə/ to rhyme with _scorer_.
The second of these is rare nowadays but exists in a dozen Shakesperian instances such as _Romeo and Juliet _"Thou art like one of those fellows that when he enters the confines of a tavern claps me his sword upon the table and says 'God send me no need of thee!' and by the operation of the second cup draws it on the drawer, when indeed there is no need."


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## pops91710

Keith Bradford said:


> A person who draws (pictures or beer) pronounced /drɔ:ə/ or /drɔ:rə/ to rhyme with _scorer_.


Certainly not in the western USA. A dresser drawer is dresser _drore,_(rhymes with roar) while a person who draws is a _draw-er_ (dra-er with a short 'a' and short 'e')


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## Anais Lee

kentix said:


> And I doubt this is true either, especially for a non-native speaker. The main ones, sure, but there are others that are quite a bit more challenging.


I find some American accents very difficult to understand, but I've only come across those in movies. Most of the Americans I've met in real life have accents that are fairly easy to understand. I did have trouble understanding some of my previous British colleagues, though, and it was somewhat frustrating. I was a little surprised since we had learned BE/RP at school (though our teachers were all non-native speakers and had their own accents). RP is probably more similar to GA than some of the British accents.


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## Roxxxannne

pops91710 said:


> Certainly not in the western USA. A dresser drawer is dresser _drore,_(rhymes with roar) while a person who draws is a _draw-er_ (dra-er with a short 'a' and short 'e')


And elsewhere in the rhotic parts of the US.


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## Roxxxannne

Anais Lee said:


> RP is probably more similar to GA than some of the British accents


To me, General American is more similar to some non-RP accents than to RP.

RP is non-rhotic and General American is rhotic. Also, there are differences in the pronunciation of  -a- and -o-.  Someone who is expert in phonological differences can explain better than I can, though.


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## Anais Lee

Roxxxannne said:


> To me, General American is more similar to some non-RP accents than to RP.
> 
> RP is non-rhotic and General American is rhotic. Also, there are differences in the pronunciation of  -a- and -o-.  Someone who is expert in phonological differences can explain better than I can, though.



I don't think rhoticity hinders comprehension that much. I guess the exposure to Hollywood movies also makes GA easier to understand. I'd find it much easier than, say, Scottish accents.


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## Roxxxannne

I quoted only your sentence "RP is probably more similar to GA than some of the British accents" on purpose, because I was commenting on similarity, not on whether one or another accent is easy to understand.   Sorry for the confusion.


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## dojibear

I think most American accents are similar to GA except "US Southern", spoken in the southeastern US. That is why the WR dictionary audioclips has two for the US: "US" and "US Southern".

drawer - WordReference.com Dictionary of English


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## Anais Lee

I assumed that an accent would be easier to understand when it was similar to the one we were already familiar with, and so I sort of confused the two. Exposure probably makes it a bit more complicated. (So I understand GA better than Scottish accents probably not because of greater similarities, but exposure.)


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## kentix

Anais Lee said:


> I find some American accents very difficult to understand, but I've only come across those in movies. Most of the Americans I've met in real life have accents that are fairly easy to understand.


Exactly. In movies (depending on the movie and character, of course) they try to talk like real life, with two people with the same accent talking to each other (or at least, one American talking another who should have some experience understanding).

Whereas, when someone talks directly to another person, they can tailor their words to the situation and that person, unlike a movie. They can try harder to make themselves understood by someone they realize doesn't speak English as their first language.

It's also more likely that the people you meet as a non-native speaker, especially if you meet them in other countries, have some experience traveling, likely have somewhat higher education and might have studied another language themselves so are aware of the issues involved. It's not the same as a random encounter with someone on the street in a random corner of a U.S. state.


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## Roxxxannne

dojibear said:


> I think most American accents are similar to GA except "US Southern", spoken in the southeastern US. That is why the WR dictionary audioclips has two for the US: "US" and "US Southern".
> 
> drawer - WordReference.com Dictionary of English


I respectfully disagree.  I hear a big difference between, for instance, a Chicago accent and GA, and between a lot of the accents in the upper tier of states across the US and GA.


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## Anais Lee

kentix said:


> Exactly. In movies (depending on the movie and character, of course) they try to talk like real life, with two people with the same accent talking to each other (or at least, one American talking another who should have some experience understanding).
> 
> Whereas, when someone talks directly to another person, they can tailor their words to the situation, unlike a movie. They can try harder to make themselves understood by someone they realize doesn't speak English as their first language.



I don't remember which movie it was. But I could barely understand anything without the subtitles. I'm pretty sure it wasn't GA.

Yes, I'm sure they've avoided slangs or anything that a non-native speaker may not understand.


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## RM1(SS)

Roxxxannne said:


> They were born and raised in Massachusetts and Maine.


Ah.  Foreigners.


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## RM1(SS)

Please note:


Anais Lee said:


> they've avoided slangs slang terms


_Slang_ is uncountable.


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## dojibear

Anais Lee said:


> I find some American accents very difficult to understand, but I've only come across those in movies.


Actors in movies often use strong non-standard accents (and slang terms) for these purposes:

(1) to match a specific historical period (how they talked in New York in 1870, not in 2020)
(2) to match a specific region (this guy is from California)
(3) to match a particular sub-class (criminals; hippies; Boston elite; Boston working class, surfers, police, lazy potheads, rural, urban, wild-west cowboys, etc.)


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## Anais Lee

While it's frustrating not to be able to understand certain regional accents, it's fun to study the differences. Diversity makes the world more interesting. 😊

Thank you all for your comments!


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