Eggcorn Forum

“Luk-shury” or even “Luk-zhury” I can understand, but since when has the letter x included a g-sound? Are the soft consonants supposed to sound more… er… “lugzhurious”?

Okay, I should remind people that discussions of things like this—that clearly aren’t eggcorns—should go on the “Slips, etc.” page.

That said, I was a little taken aback by this because I say “lug-zhury”; I always have, and I’m, well, not young. I followed Thew’s link above, and sure enough, Merriam Webster seems to give two pronunciation options: more or less “luk-shury” and “luk-zhury.” It’s slightly unclear—they use a bit of typographical shorthand in providing the second pronunciation. In any case, this surprised me—the second option seems very awkward to pronounce, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone use it. In a consonant cluster like /ksh/ or /gzh/ after a stressed syllable, you’d expect the whole cluster to be voiced [gzh] or unvoiced [ksh]. The mixture of unvoiced and voiced consonants in “luk-zhury” seems just plain weird.

So I went to the OED. They give two versions of “luk-shury” (the differences between the two have to do with the pronunciation of that second vowel) and also “lug-zhury.” That’s more or less what I would have expected. “Lug-zhury” is the last of the OED’s three options—indicating that it is less common than the other two—but it is a standard option.

I suspect the second Merriam Webster pronunciation is just plain wrong, but perhaps there’s an American dialect out there somewhere that uses that bizarre “luk-zhury” approach.

For me it’s luk-shurry, but lug-zhurious and lug-zhuriate and I think I’m right and so is everyone else.

Maybe a phonologist could figure out what’s going on here, but I don’t think I can.

I can’t find a pattern that works all the time. I think most of the cases where an “x” becomes /gz/ instead of /ks/ seem to be places in which the stress is on the syllable that follows the x. Some examples: examples, exacting, examine, exhilarating, anxiety, auxiliary, exiguous, exhausting. The problem is that I can also think of some counter-examples: vexatious, hexagonal, taxonomy, Maxine, toxicity.

And then we’ve also got the problem of the word with which this started—“luxury.” But—for those of us who use the “lug-zhury” pronunciation—I think that might be explained by a generalization of the pronunciation of “luxurious,” in which the stress does fall on the syllable following the x.

No doubt many different factors are involved here—the origin of a word, the stress pattern in the word, whether the vowel following the x is high or low, back or front, etc.

All of this reminds me of the time a Scandinavian friend asked, “Why do you say ‘house’ for the singular but ‘hou-zez’ for the plural? Why does the s turn into a z?” I think my answer was something along the lines of “Uh…uh…uh….”

(By the way, both Merriam Webster and the OED are of the opinion that “aug-ziliary” is the standard pronunciation; neither gives an example of “auk-siliary.”)