2022-02-14
ศัพท์ น่าสับสน - Set – D - drought & drouth
แนะนำการใช้ ตามที่ส่วนใหญ่ใช้ แต่ละท้องถิ่น
ความหมาย อาจผันแปร ตาม ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค
Dictionary.com:
ออกเสียง drought & drouth = “DROUT”
Dictionary of Problem Words and Expressions:
drought & drouth
These words with different spellings refer to dry weather, lack of rain or other precipitation, and to any extended shortage.
Drought is pronounced “drout”; drouth is pronounced with ath ending.
Drought is the preferred spelling.
Examples:
“The drought (drouth) extended for three months, ruining all hopes for a good crop of vegetables.”
“The team went without a victory for the entire season, a long period of drought (drouth).”
Dictionary.com:
HOW TO PRONOUNCE DROUGHT
Drought and drouth,
nouns derived from the adjective dry plus a suffix,
are spellings that represent two phonetic developments
of the same Old English word,
and are pronounced [drout] and [drouth] respectively.
The latter pronunciation, therefore,
is not a mispronunciation of drought.
The now unproductive suffix -th1 and its alternate form -t
were formerly used to derive nouns fromadjectives or verbs,
resulting in such pairs as drouth — drought from dry
and highth—height (the former now obsolete) from high.
In American English, drought with the pronunciation [drout]
is common everywhere in educated speech,
and is the usual printed form.
Dictionary.com:
MORE ABOUT DROUGHT
What does drought mean?
A drought is a long period with no rain
or unusually low levels of rain or other precipitation.
Because weather and climate are different
in different places throughout the world,
there is no single definition of whatcounts as a drought.
However, it always refers to a significant period of dry weather.
Droughts have many harmful effects,
including water shortages, crop failure, and in some cases famine,
among other things.
The word is often used in the phrase drought conditions,
referring to very dry conditions resulting from a lack of rainfall.
Drought can also be used in a figurative way
to refer to an extended shortage of orlong period without something,
as in
The city has the longest championship drought in all of sports.
Example:
The drought continued for more than three weeks and wildfires started to appear.
Where does drought come from?
The first records of the word drought in English come from before 1000.
It comes from the Old English word drūgath,
which is related to the Dutch droogte, meaning “dryness.”
The English word dry shares a root with drought.
Droughts can last months and even years.
That doesn’t mean there’s no rain at all during that time,
but it does mean that there’s a lot less than there usually is.
(Most deserts have very low levels of rainfall,
but we wouldn’t say they’re experiencing a drought.)
Droughts have several negative consequences.
First, they create a shortage of water for drinking and for growing crops, which can cause the crops to fail and lead to famine.
The excessively dry conditions causedby droughts
can also add to the risk of wildfires,
which can start more easily and burn more rapidly,
using all of the dried plants as their fuel.
When used figuratively,
drought refers to a long period without something,
as in
You complain about not getting a second date
but I haven’t had a first date in months—I’m in a real drought.
The term dry spell can be used as a synonym for both
the literal and figurative sense of drought
(though, in the literal sense,
a dry spell isn’t usually as serious or as long as a drought).
Merriam-Webster Dictionary:
Word History
'Drought' & 'Drouth' Take Us Back In Time
The word 'drought' once had three common variantspellings.
Two of these can still be found today.
Once summer arrives, some parts of the country
invariably find themselves deep into a drought.
Or, depending on where you are, that might be a drouth.
Drought first showed up in English over 1,000 years ago
to refer to a dry, parched place, like the desert.
The word is ultimately from the Old English word for "dry" (dryge);
the adjective turned into a verb (drugian, "to make dry"),
and then that verb was adapted into a noun
(drugath or drugoth, "a dry place").
By the time the Old English noun was taken into Middle English,
it had three common spellings: drought, drougth, and drouth.
You may wonder why one word with one fixed spelling
(drugian) ended up as a noun with three common spellings (drought, drougth, and drouth).
We are accustomed to thinking of English spelling
as being independent of pronunciation:
after all, rough, cough, and bough are all spelled the same
and they don't rhyme, do they?
But this is a modern way of approaching English.
Back during the Middle English period,
English spelling was based entirely on pronunciation.
Middle English was a language
that had a large number of dialects,
and each dialect had its own way of pronouncing words.
Because spelling was based on
how words were pronounced,
that meant that even simple words, like friend, had dozens of variant spellings: frend, freond, freynd, frundle, freend, froend, and so on.
The three Middle English spellings of drought
reflected the main pronunciations of the word throughout England.
In time, thanks in part to the introduction of the printing press in England and the widespread distribution of books printed in London
throughout the whole nation, spelling began to standardize.
We lost the Middle English drougth,
but both drought and drouth hung on.
Why did drouth hang on?
Because there were still plenty of people
who pronounced the word /DROWTH/.
Today, drouth still has occasional use,
mostly in the American Southwest, Southeast, and Midwest,
though drought has substantially more use.
And how do you pronounce it?
/DROWT/ and /DROWTH/ are
the most current and commonest pronunciations,
though you may still near a rare and older pronunciation,
/DRAWT/ or /DRAWTH/.
This pronunciation was falling out of use by the time our Webster's Third New International Dictionary was published in 1961:
that dictionary says that
this variant pronunciation is only used "sometimes."
