Pronounciation

[MWB]

How do you pronounce the word "Heinous"
Heenous or Haynous?

[Quizmonster]

Hay-niss and hee-niss are both acceptable according to Chambers Dictionary.

[Quizmonkey]

And as you're misspelling it, you're probably mispronouncing 'pronunciation' too!

[Buenchico]

QM: Are you sure that Chamber's gives the pronunciation of the second syllable as 'niss'? The Concise Oxford states that it should be pronounced as it is written.(i.e. with the 'ou' sounding as in 'bound').

The Concise Oxford Dictionary only offers 'hay-nous' (with the stress on the first syllable) as acceptable pronunciation.

Chris

[jno]

Chris, I think (without a dictionary to hand) that the 2nd syllable would be pronounced with the 'schwa' verb - that is, the sort of grunt that often appears in unstressed syllables (eg the 2nd syllable in 'syllable' and maybe even the 3rd). The idea of trying to rhyme it with mouse, while not actually stressing it, seems like pretty hard work.

[Quizmonster]

Chris, Chambers of course uses phonetic symbols that questioners here might well be unfamiliar with to indicate sounds. So that there would be no confusion here, I wrote it (the 'n' + *upside-down 'e' + s) as 'niss', though I might equally have written it as 'nuss' or even 'ness', I suppose. My point was to indicate that there was no 'ow' sound which someone might easily assume with the letter-sequence 'nous'. Indeed, the very word 'nous', meaning common sense, is thus pronounced! Surely 'bound' does have an 'ow' sound, too...at least it does the way I say it! That would surely give hay-nowce.
As regards the two possible pronunciations, I'm sure Chambers has simply taken on board the fact that people do nowadays pronounce the word in both these ways. My edition was produced in 2003, whereas my version of The Oxford English Dictionary - which agrees with you about the single pronunciation - dates from the 1980s. Things change in twenty years.

* The upside-down 'e' is pronounced like the 'a' in 'another', but I felt writing it as 'a' would simply have made things even more difficult.

But what the hey! Cheers