Category Scientific English

How to pronounce paralyze and parallelize

At a recent conference, I witnessed a speaker talking about paralyzing various computer codes for better performance. If this sounds confusing, you are absolutely right. The speaker was merely pronouncing the word parallelize incorrectly. The OED includes the following meaning for the verb paralyze: to prevent something from functioning normally and its pronunciation as (listen

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Naughty notifications

While listening to an online lecture about software engineering presented by a German, I noticed a systematic, incorrect pronunciation of the words notify and notification. The correct pronunciations are readily found online, for example in the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary: notify: [ˈnəʊtɪfaɪ] (BE), [ˈnoʊtɪfaɪ] (AE) | listen here notification: [ˌnəʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (BE), [ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] (AE) | listen here

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How to pronounce interpret

This week’s seminar speaker (German, but currently working in the US) made several interesting pronunciation mistakes. Most notably, he kept pronouncing the verb interpret so incorrectly that I did not even recognize it immediately. To understand what went wrong, we best look at the phonetic spelling. The are actually several pronunciations of interpret that are

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Monotonic/monotone vs. monotonous

At a physics conference I attended last week in Berlin, I came across yet another example of tricky distinctions to master. Several speakers confused the words monotonic or monotone with monotonous. While these words can be used interchangeably in some situations, only monotonic and monotone are correct in a mathematical context. The Oxford online dictionary

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