Many people have told us that one of the things they find hardest about learning new vocabulary words is learning how to pronounce them correctly. It’s often difficult to simply look at a word and know immediately what the proper pronunciation is. For example, if you don’t know today’s word, how would you think it’s pronounced?

ASS-wahj
uh-SOO-uhj
AH-soo-AGE
uh-SOO-ay-gee

Frankly, any of these are possible, if you’re only looking at the letters and using some of the different ways those letters are pronounced in combinations that you’ve already seen in other English words. However, the correct pronunciation is uh-SWAYJ. This verb means “to soothe” or “to relieve” – something that’s obvious once you look at the word’s etymology, and see that it comes from the Latin prefix ad- (“toward”) plus the Latin root word suavis (“sweet, agreeable”). When you assuage someone’s fears, for example, you are moving their emotional state towards a more pleasant level.

If you have a good dictionary, whether on-line or paper, you’ll have the tools you need to look up a word’s pronunciation before you try to use it in conversation. If you’re using an on-line dictionary (or a vocabulary-improvement system like Ultimate Vocabulary) then you’ll also have an icon somewhere on the screen that you can click to hear how the word is pronounced by a native speaker. Without this helpful audio assistance, you’ll need to know how to interpret the pronunciation guide for the word, which will be written in symbols that are part of the International Phonetic Alphabet, or “IPA” for short. Here’s how the word assuage looks when written using IPA symbols:

It might seem like a lot of work to learn what is essentially another alphabet in order to understand how to pronounce English words, but the advantage is that because this is an international system, you’ll be able to use this guide to help you pronounce words in nearly any language. For more information on the IPA, check out this resource.