Download
← All posts

Either, Neither, Tomato: The US–UK Words That Follow No Rule At All

Eventually every learner runs into this: some people say either as /ˈiːðər/ ("EE-ther"), others say /ˈaɪðər/ ("EYE-ther"). Neither one is wrong. Check any dictionary and both pronunciations are listed, with neither one marked as a variant of the other.

This is a different kind of US–UK difference than the ones you've probably already learned about.

Two different kinds of "different"

Most American–British pronunciation differences follow a rule. Whether the r gets pronounced at the end of a word — car, hard, better, teacher — is one rule that covers an entire class of words at once. The /æ/-to-/ɑː/ shift in bath, can't, and dance is another whole class moving together. Learn the rule once, and you can predict the pronunciation of a word you've never heard before.

Either isn't like that. There's no rule to extract from it, because the split doesn't come from a pattern — it's just this one specific word that happened to settle into two different pronunciations on two sides of the ocean, unrelated to the letters around it or any sound that follows. You can't apply "the either rule" to any other word, because there isn't one. It's just this word's own quirky history. Neither follows the same pair: /ˈniːðər/ or /ˈnaɪðər/, both equally correct.

And it's not just this one word

Once you know to look for it, you'll find a scattered handful of words like this — each one independently settled into two pronunciations, with no connection between them:

Line these up and a pattern in the absence of a pattern emerges: each difference sits on one specific sound in one specific word, and that same sound behaves completely differently in a neighboring word. The vowel choice in tomato tells you nothing about potato. The first vowel in vitamin doesn't transfer to visible. Each of these words is its own memorization item, not a rule you can generalize.

Why this happens

Most of these words settled into their current pronunciations independently on each side of the Atlantic, sometime after the 18th or 19th century, as dictionary-makers and broadcasters on each side went their own way without coordinating. Systemic differences — like whether r gets pronounced — trace back to a shift in the whole sound system, so they ripple through every word that fits the pattern. These particular words just got unlucky: each one settled into whatever pronunciation felt natural locally, entirely on its own, with no system behind it.

What to actually do about it

Don't spend energy deciding which one is "more correct" — both are, and both are in the dictionary. What actually sounds off is mixing them: saying either the American way and then vitamin the British way in the same conversation reads as inconsistent, more than either choice alone ever would. Pick whichever accent system you're generally following, and let these few isolated words follow that same system — that matters more than agonizing over any single word.

And because there's no rule to derive them from, you can't reason your way to the right answer the way you can with r-dropping or the trap-bath split. These have to be looked up and learned one at a time.

Words like this are exactly where guessing goes wrong, because there's nothing to reason from. PHONO reads any English text through your camera and marks every word with IPA — you can hear both US and UK audio side by side to check which one you're actually saying.
Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/phono-english-phonetics-ipa/id6783243417 · phono.douhouse.com