How to Pronounce the Idiom Spread the Word American English
Happy New Year everyone. I hope you had a
great time spending New Year’s Eve and New
Year’s Day with friends and family. 2010 was
an awesome year. Well, it had its ups and
downs I suppose for everybody, but, it was
a great year. And I want to thank everyone
who watched my videos, who contacted me with
a question, who was involved in the community
of Rachel’s English on Facebook. And, I want
to thank everybody who told somebody else
about my website and my YouTube channel. I
know a lot of users did because they told
me. And that brings us to the idiom we are
going to go over today, spread the word. It’s
what some of my users have been doing, and
I hope that they will continue to do. And
I’m inviting everyone who uses my website
to spread the word about Rachel’s English
because in 2011 I would love to quit my job
and have Rachel’s English be what I do. Period.
The only thing I give my time to work-wise.
So let’s go over the idiom to spread the word.
It means not just to tell one person, but
to tell many people. For example, I’m having
a party tonight, spread the word. That doesn’t
mean tell John and Mary, it means tell everyone
you know. Another example sentence: Thanks
for using Rachel’s English, and thanks for
helping to spread the word. As I said a lot
of people have already told me that they’ve
done this. If they’re a teacher perhaps they’ve
used it in their classroom, told students.
A student, maybe they’ve told fellow students,
their teachers, friends and family, some people
have posted it to their friends on Facebook.
It’s all so helpful in spreading the word,
and I thank you for it. Now, how to pronounce
spread the word. It begins with the SPR consonant
cluster, and you do go through all three of
those sounds: ss, pp, rr. Spr-, spr-, spre-.
Opens into the ‘eh’ as in ‘bed’ vowel, spre-,
dd. The tongue comes up for the D: spread,
the. Voiced TH sound and the schwa, it’s an
unaccented syllable. Spread the, spread the,
word. The W consonant sound, the R vowel/consonant
sound, ww, rr, dd. And the D sound. So the
lips start very tight for the W, rr, they
open a little bit for that R vowel, wor-,
wor-, d. And the tongue, which has been back
a bit for the R, wor-d, comes up and the top
touches, dd, the roof of the mouth and pulls
down to make the D sound. So we’ve got the
W consonant, the R vowel/consonant sound,
it’s just one sound here, and the D sound.
WW, rr, dd. Word. Spread the word. That’s
it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English