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Buoyancy

Posted by R. Berg on October 26, 2002

In Reply to: Buoy pronunciation posted by TheFallen on October 24, 2002

: A purely idle question, but it made me wonder. I was watching some US-made nature show with my daughter over the weekend - all about protecting parts of the Hawaiian coastline from overfishing, so a worthy cause indeed. That's hardly the point though. Part of the scheme to monitor fish stocks involved divers going down at marked areas to count fish types and numbers. These areas were marked with buoys, which we over here in the UK pronounce to sound exactly the same as "boys". However the diver being interviewed at the time, who was some marine biologist PhD from the US, called them "boo-weeze". Is this the typical pronunciation in the US?

On a related question, I've always heard "buoyancy" pronounced as if it had no U. Amer. Herit. Dict. gives that pronunciation and BOO-yan-cy.

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