In Which Our Intrepid Blogger Indulges in a Shameless Display of Word-Geekery

and

Reveals Hidden Bardic Secrets

with

Handy User's Guide to Getting It Right

at least

Much of the Time

 

There's an anomalous class of words in English that mean one thing when stressed on the first syllable, and another when stressed on the second.

Words like adept, consort, present.

There are roughly 120 of these “bisexual” words in the English lexicon. All are bisyllabic. Virtually all come to English from French; virtually all originated in Latin as particle + verb.

They're the nightmare of those trying to learn English, and they manage to trip up even fluent native speakers on a regular basis.

If there's an official grammarian's name for this class of words, I don't know what it is. I call them “dual-stress homographs.” For the truly shameless, there's a list below of examples that I've collected over the years.

Here's a quickie rule-of-thumb for telling which stress is which.

In most cases, the noun is stressed on the first syllable (AD-dress), and the verb (or, sometimes, adjective) on the second (ad-DRESS). It's interesting that it's the verbs, rather than the nouns, that retain the original French stress (French favors last-syllable stress); make of it what you will.

In fine, you have to be a-DEPT to be an A-dept.

absent, abscess, abstract, access, addict, address, adept, adult, affect, ally, annex, attribute, august

buffet

collect, combat, commune, compact, complex, compound, compress, concert, concrete, conduct, confine, conflict, conserve, console, consort, construct, content, contest, contract, contrast, converse, convert, convict, convoy

decrease, default, defect, defense, detail, detour, digest, discharge, discourse, discount, dispatch

entail, entrance, escort, excess, excise, exploit, export, extract

ferment, finance, forbear

impact, import, impress, imprint, incense, incline, increase, insult, intrigue, inverse, invert, invite

minute

object, obverse, occult, offense

perfect, perfume, permit, pervert, presage, present, pretense, proceed, process, produce, progress, project, protest, purport, purpose

rebel, rebound, recall, recap, recess, recoil, record, recount, redo, redress, reflex, refund, refuse, regress, reject, relapse, relay, remount, repeat, research, resource, retail, retake, retard, retort, rewrite, romance

secret, subject, survey, suspect

torment, transfer, transport, tribune

upset

 

Above: Yury Shakov, Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg