Word stress

Units of spoken English, such as words, phrases, and sentences have some syllables or words stressed. All multisyllabic English words must have stress on some syllable. The stress given to a syllable in a word is called the word stress or lexical stress. Compound words are composed of multiple words that together mean one idea. Examples of compound words are phrasal verbs, compound nouns and compound adjectives. Compound words are fixed expressions since they always occur together to mean something quite different from their constituent words. Since they have one meaning, compound words work like one word and have their own intrinsic stress patterns. Word stress, including compound word stress, is the foundation for all other types of stress since without this knowledge we cannot stress phrases and sentences correctly. To learn word stress, we first need to know how to count the syllables of English words.

Topics relating to word stress


Table of contents

Syllable counting

        The English syllable

                Single vowel sound

         15 vowel phonemes of American English

Adjacent vowel letters

Semi-vowels

Consonant clusters

Consonant digraphs

Affixes and compounds

Doubled consonants

-es and -ed

Compound words

Consonants between vowels

            Long vs short vowels

Syllabic consonants


Stressed syllables

        Stress and number of syllables of words

Monosyllabic words

Mispronounced monosyllabic words

Two syllable words

Mispronounced two syllable words

Three syllable words

Words with more than three syllables

Secondary stress

    Stress shift        

            Suffix stress patterns

Stress-neutral suffixes

Stress-shifting suffixes

First syllable before the suffix

Second syllable before the suffix

Stress carrying suffixes

Stress with prefixes

Unstressed prefixes

Stressable prefixes

            Stress shift in words

        literal vs derived meaning

        Different parts of speech


Compound word stress

    Phrasal verbs

Single-stressed phrasal verbs

Stranded preposition

Stressed preposition

Double-stressed phrasal verbs

Separable Phrasal Verbs

Rhythmic stress shift

Three-part phrasal verbs

Adverb or preposition

    Noun expressions

Descriptive noun phrases

Acronyms and numerals

Stress shift

Implicit contrast

Compound nouns

Types of compound nouns

Compound vs descriptive noun phrases

Gerunds vs participles

Phrasal verbs to compound nouns

    Compound adjectives

Hyphens

Stress and components of compound adjectives

Stress on the first component

Stress on the second component

More than two words

Use of a singular noun form

Stress shift


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