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What's the difference between how once and wants are pronounced? I don't hear a difference- is there one?

Void
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米凯乐
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  • There is definitely a difference in my dialect (Northeastern US) although it is small. The vowel sound is slightly different (sort of "ah" vs. "uh") and the /ts/ of wants is distinct from the /s/ of once. – stangdon May 04 '17 at 20:53
  • There is a difference, though obviously not the way you and your milieu pronounce it. I suggest you look in a dictionary, preferably an online one with audible pronunciation. – Robusto May 04 '17 at 20:53
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    In my AmE dialect, they are indistinguishable. – TimR May 04 '17 at 21:44
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    Central Ohio for the last 50 years (grew up here). I wuhnt one. He wuhnts two. I came here because somebody asked me what I said, "Once what??" And I realized it is the same vowel sound! Weird! – Joy Oct 16 '20 at 00:48

2 Answers2

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JR's answer focuses more on the vowels, I'm going to explain what happens to the consonants in word pairs like wants/once.


Actually, both once and wants are usually pronounced with a /t/, but we may not realise it whilst speaking fast.
Other word that are usually pronounced the same include prince/prints, deviance/deviants, innocence/innocents etc.

So what happens here?

There are loads of English words that contain a nasal (/n m ŋ/) followed by a fricative (/s f ʃ θ/ etc). For instance, once /wʌns/.

Here's a good explanation from English after RP by Geoff Lindsey:

The /n/ is a stop sound, which means that the oral airflow of speech is stopped; the tongue blade is held against the alveolar ridge while breath is re-directed through the nose. As /n/ changes to /s/ [which is an oral consonant i.e the air comes out through the mouth], airflow must be switched from nasal to oral, and at the same time the stoppage at the alveolar ridge must be released,

[...]

Epenthesis is more likely if the fricative after the nasal is voiceless, when the articulatory system has an additional voicing change to handle [i.e. moving from a voiced sound like /n/ to a voiceless one like /s/]. It’s less likely if the fricative is at the beginning of a stressed syllable, e.g. inˈsane [not *in[t]sane].

(pp 63-64)

And it results in an epenthetic stop (/t p k/), homorganic (having the same place of articulation) with the nasal and creates [wʌnts] in this case which may be indistinguishable from 'wants' in some accents (not all). Another common example is prince which is usually pronounced the same as prints. Epenthetic stops between a nasal and a fricative are very common and natural and may be barely perceptible.

This phenomenon is called epenthesis (excrescence).

Other examples include len[k]th, stren[k]th, youn[k]ster etc.
Bilabial examples would be warm[p]th, Thom[p]son, some[p]thing etc.

In many varieties of English, once and wants have the same vowel, so both of them may be indistinguishable.

Void
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They are quite similar, but the vowel sounds are different.

Regional dialects may vary, but I think once rhymes with "dunce", whereas wants rhymes with "haunts."

J.R.
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    As I hear wants it rhymes with nonce. Midwestern by way of New England. – Robusto May 04 '17 at 20:54
  • In my dialect (Northeastern US, specifically NYC) wants doesn't sound like haunts at all. wants is very distinctly WUHnts and haunts is HAWnts. – stangdon May 04 '17 at 20:54
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    @stangdon: WUHnts ... I've never heard that pronunciation, or else never noticed it if I did. – Robusto May 04 '17 at 20:56
  • @stangdon - So it seems like you view the O.P.'s words more like homophones than I do. Interesting. – J.R. May 04 '17 at 20:57
  • @Robusto - Is it more like WAWnts in your regiolect? – stangdon May 04 '17 at 20:58
  • @stangdon: Not at all. That pronunciation I associate with western Pennsylvania, or maybe Boston (where I lived for nearly three decades). But I have heard it. As I said above, wants rhymes with nonce for me. – Robusto May 04 '17 at 20:59
  • @J.R. - Not exact homophones, but pretty close. My initial inclination was to say "don't be silly, of course they're different", but listening closely, I have to admit they're quite close. – stangdon May 04 '17 at 20:59
  • @Robusto - Interesting. To me, "nonce" begins with a more distinct NAAH sound than "wants". Unfortunately I am running out of good phonetic/phonological terminology to describe these things. :-( I should really learn IPA one of these days. – stangdon May 04 '17 at 21:02
  • Interestingly, I just Skyped a friend in California and she says it half the time to rhyme with nonce and half with once. Go figure. When she says "I want it" it sounds like "I won it" to me. She grew up in SoCal, too, so who knows? Sometimes it can be hard to distinguish regional accents from idiosyncratic ones. – Robusto May 04 '17 at 21:02
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    Chipping in from Australia; I pronounce them as once/dunce and wants/nonce. – Cantalouping May 04 '17 at 21:34
  • I use the vowel /ɒ/ for both words, but RP uses /ʌ/ in "once" and /ɒ/ in "wants". – rjpond Oct 16 '20 at 05:35