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One Spelling, Five Sounds: What "our" Is Actually Doing in colour, hour, four, journey, and courage

Look closely and you'll notice the same four letters — o-u-r — sitting inside colour, hour, four, journey, and courage. Five completely ordinary words, one shared spelling, and almost no overlap in how that spelling actually sounds. If you've ever tried to sound out an unfamiliar "our" word and gotten it wrong, this is why: English never gave that string one consistent pronunciation to begin with.

Group 1: /ə/ — the noun suffix, where the "u" barely earns its keep

Mostly abstract nouns, with "our" sitting unstressed at the end of the word, reduced all the way to a flat /ə/:

Here's a useful tell: American spelling drops the "u" entirely — color, favor, honor, labor, neighbor — and the pronunciation doesn't change at all. If deleting a letter changes nothing about how a word sounds, that letter was barely doing anything to begin with.

Group 2: /aʊə/ — a full syllable on its own, loud and open

These are short, standalone words where "our" carries the whole syllable as a wide-open diphthong:

Worth noticing: hour and our are exact homophones, both /aʊə/. So are flour and flower. Spelled nothing alike, said identically.

Group 3: /ɔː/ — merged with plain "or"

In this group, "our" collapses down to sound exactly like words spelled with "or" — the "u" essentially disappears:

Mourn and the morn- in morning are homophones, /mɔːn/. Four and for sound identical too — this group has simply been absorbed into the "or" pronunciation.

Group 4: /ɜː/ — hiding inside journey and journal

A smaller set, but high-frequency, where "our" turns into the same vowel as in bird or learn:

Learners often guess journey by analogy with four and land on something like /ˈdʒɔːni/. It's actually running on a fourth, unrelated pattern.

Group 5: /ʌ/ — the courage family

Courage and its relatives reduce "our" to a short, clipped /ʌ/:

(One note: American speech often gives courage an r-coloured vowel, closer to /ˈkɝːɪdʒ/, noticeably different from the British /ˈkʌrɪdʒ/ — one of the rare "our" words where the US/UK gap is obvious.)

Why so many patterns? Five different histories, one surviving spelling

This isn't randomness. Group 1 mostly traces back to a French noun suffix (-eur/-our). Group 2 is native English, where "our" has always been a loud diphthong. Group 3 simply merged with "or" spellings over time. Groups 4 and 5 each carry their own separate route into English, and the spelling froze long after the sound had already settled. You don't need the etymology — just knowing there's a reason, rather than pure chaos, makes the exceptions easier to accept.

How to actually handle it

Don't memorize the history. Learn each group as a small batch of familiar words and get a feel for which "identity" a new word is likely to have: an unstressed abstract noun ending in "-our" is probably /ə/; a short standalone word is probably /aʊə/. For anything else, check the transcription instead of guessing by analogy — this spelling has too many exceptions for pattern-matching to be reliable.

Not sure which of the five an unfamiliar "our" word belongs to? PHONO reads any English text through your camera and marks every word with IPA, with both US and UK audio, so you never have to guess from spelling again.
Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/phono-english-phonetics-ipa/id6783243417 · phono.douhouse.com