Pronunciations of Combining Forms and Affixes in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The article focuses on the revised approach to representing pronunciations of combining forms and affixes in the third edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3). It explains that OED3 replaces headword-level pronunciations with statements about typical stress patterns and vowel reduction, while providing British and American pronunciations for thousands of lemmas within these entries for the first time. The article details how pronunciation information is tailored to four different entry structures to balance phonetic accuracy and user clarity, emphasizing stress placement and vowel reduction rather than isolated pronunciations of rarely spoken combining forms or affixes. This approach aims to enhance usability by offering representative examples and cross-references, acknowledging the complexity of English stress patterns and the challenges of documenting pronunciations for morphemes that often occur only in compounds.