Pronunciation of adjectives ending with "-ate"

Question

• Legitimate

How should I pronounce it?

It's confusing me. There are so many vocabularies of adjectives ending with "ate"

1. as in meet or as in "it" : like "tim -it"
2. as in a boy : (a boy, a book), not amphasis of a
3. as in mate: ei

Answer 1

There are no hard and fast rules for the pronunciation of -ate endings that I'm aware of, but here's a general rule of thumb that you can stick to:

Monosyllables that end in -ate are almost always pronounced /-eɪt/, for example, mate, fate, rate, sate, date, gate, hate, late etc.

Disyllabic and polysyllabic words:

• Verbs ending in -ate are usually pronounced /-eɪt/ as in hesitate, operate, communicate, accelerate etc.
• Nouns ending in -ate are usually pronounced /-ət/, for example, chocolate, climate, advocate, estimate etc.
• Adjectives ending in -ate are usually pronounced with /-ət/, for example, legitimate, approximate, appropriate etc.

Now some adjectives and nouns I listed above can also be used as verbs, in which case, they're pronounced with /-eɪt/.

• 'Estimate', 'approximate', 'appropriate' etc., are pronounced with /-eɪt/ when used as verbs.

This rule of thumb is fairly consistent.