My wife pronounces it three different ways, each of which she can support. I pronounce it one, but other than that it’s the way I’ve heard it I can’t support my pronunciation even after some searches. What’s yours and why?
I pronounce it like sen + tar, and accent it like boxcar. Can’t think of a reason, that’s just how it looks to me.
Cent-aur.
Cen-toor
sen-tor
As in taurus, which rhymes with torus.
This is the only way in English I’ve ever known
A bunch of Americans pronounce it sen-tar for some reason that I’ve never understood.
That’s how it looks.
I also pronounce Taurus closer to “Tarus” than toorus.
That’s how merriam webster pronounces it! I’d pronounce it like that as well, got curious, so I googled
That’s one of my wife’s answers.
You’re very prompt.
Correctly, smugly and pretentiously
Nice.
Can’t are
If it’s in a Greek or ancient Latin context I pronounce it with a hard C, but if it’s a general English context I pronounce it with a soft C.
I’m not sure what the third way would be.
The third way would be a difference in how the diphthong is pronounced: “-aur” or “-ower.”
So far, the main way I haven’t seen suggested.
I guess I owe my wife an apology.
¢-aur — I’m not sure why I pronounce it that way; it’s just how I’ve always pronounced it.
sen-tar
“sen-” like “cent” (like 25 cents), and “-tar” like “a tar pit”
Cent-our
sen-tar.
i could see sen-tor.
Ken (as the name) - ta (with a hard T and A as in catapult) - ur (with an u like in Vonnegut’s name)
tho I’m from europe speaking a weird ass language
Sen-towr
Sehn-tar, because I am American and that’s how I learned to say it. How am I meant to justify a common pronunciation?
Sin tar is the usual way, though it’ll sometimes come out more sin tawr, where the au is a bit more drawn out.
Sin tore is a fairly common one.
However, sin tar is more common, at least with what I’ve heard in meat space. That’s a fairly limited thing though, since most of the people I have talked to over my fifty years have been fellow southerners. We do tend to use softer vowels in most cases, and tar is softer than tore in the way we tend to do vowels.
However, with the latin and Greek origins of the word, I’d argue that the tar or tawr would lean closer to that than tore, just because of similar words. When an au is present in medical terminology (which is where almost all of my latin and Greek comes from) it usually gets pronounced aw or ah, not oh.
But, I never hear anyone pronounce the initial C as a K, and that’s the way it would have been in both of those languages originally. The Greek version is spelled with a K, when written with the usual alphabet rather than Greek. Kentauros.
Which is an aside.
Wikipedia lists the two I did as the usual pronunciations, fwiw. And all the dictionaries with audio options are either those two, or slight variations of them, where the au sound is rounder or flatter than the norm.
Thing is, it’s a word in a living language. Whatever the original English pronunciation may have been, that can change, so supporting a pronunciation is kind of meaningless. What matters is consensus over time, and by location.
So, a regional accent that sounds more like cent-ur is just as valid in that region, it just isn’t standard. So would any other variant be, if there’s enough people using it to be called a consensus.
I see that your dialect pronounces “pen” and “pin” the same. Midwestern US?
Southeast.
