 OUPblog  This old <i>house</i> and these old <i>houses</i> I don’t recall the first time I noticed the pronunciation of houses as HOWsiz with a voiceless s sound rather than HOWziz with a voiced z. But I remember thinking: “That’s weird. I wonder if houses is becoming regularized. Historically, the word is one of those nouns whose singular and plural stems alternate between voiceless and voiceled sounds. The most prominent examples of such alternations involve f and v, as in singular/plural pairs like wife and wives, life and lives, leaf and leaves, etc. With the f/v alternation, the sound change is reflected as a spelling change, but not so with house and houses. The pair house/houses is the only example of an s/z alteration between the singular and the plural, though there are other s/z alternations in English, like louse and lousy, lost and lose, useful and use, et. cetera. I checked to see what dictionaries had to say about house and houses. The online Merriam Webster Dictionary gives the pronunciation ˈhau̇-zəz also -səz, where the “also” indicates a less common pronunciation. The online American Heritage Dictionary (based on the 2011 5th edition) gives both houʹ zĭz and houʹ sĭz for the plural, also recognizing the new pronunciation. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, gives British English /ˈhaʊzᵻz/ and U.S. English /ˈhaʊzəz/, both with the z sound, and just differing in the height of the final vowel. Webster’s Third (from 1963) gives hau̇z͘ ə̇z and flags hau̇s ə̇z as “chiefly substandard.” Going back a few decades, the 1934 Webster’s Second only gives the z pronunciations. The difference in transcriptions systems notwithstanding, what all of this suggests is that in the mid-twentieth century the HOWsiz variant was common enough to be noticed but had not yet been sanctioned by elite pronouncers. Webster’s Second ignored it, Webster Third shakes a finger at it, and today’s Merriam.com is fine with either variant. So what happened? Most other nouns ending in –se don’t change their pronunciation in the plural (horse, case, blouse, course, excuse, lease, base, purse, vise, etc.), so perhaps houses is undergoing some analogical leveling (as we linguists call this regularization). Even though house is a fairly common word, and such words tend to preserve their irregularity, houses has finally come around. Reinforcing the contrast with the verb house, which ends in a z-sound, could also be a factor. And what about the possessive forms, like that house’s color? For me, the first s of house’s is voiceless and most dictionaries don’t address the issue. (Webster’s Third, curiously enough, lists both options for the possessive.) It’s worth noting too that house is not the only voiceless/voiced alternation that is not reflected in spelling. It’s just the only one with an s. A smallish number of words ending in th also show alternation between singular voiceless th (as in thin) and plural voiced th (as in then): mouth and mouths, baths and baths, wreathe and wreathes often show alternation of the two variants ofth. In a 2018 article in the journal Language Variation and Change, titled “Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð∼θ]s of change,” linguist Laurel MacKenzie of New York University reported on the frequencies of devoicing in more than 2,000 tokens of words in spoken corpora. MacKenzie looked at a number of factors, such as the age and gender of the speaker, the surrounding sounds and morphemes, and more. She found that houses was pronounced with a stem-final s about 50% of the time, with younger speakers leading the way: the voiced z pronunciation was present for about 65% of speakers born in the 1940s but dropped to a rate of 38% among speakers born in the 1980s. The voiceless/voiced alternation of th is also being lost. And as one might expect, the words where spelling reinforces the alternation (like knife and knives) are have better retention of the voiceless/voiced alternation. When I first noticed the HOWsiz pronunciation, it was already pretty robust. I may not switch my pronunciation of houses, but I’m going to be listening more carefully to these plurals. Featured image by Toa Heftiba via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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