These pages will introduce you to some of the basic principles of word-stress and it will provide you with a few useful and simple rules thanks to which you will know how to stress long words such as "globalisation," "institutionalise" and so on.

In many languages, pronunciation is syllable-based, that is to say, every syllable is pronounced in the same way, over the same stretch of time. However, as you might perhaps already know, English is stress-based, which means that all the syllables in a word are not pronounced in the same way: some syllables are "stressed", others are not. All lexical words that have more than one syllable will have a "primary stress." Although this is the main stress,  some words can also have an additional "secondary stress" - which appears before the primary stress - but which is not as important.

When an English dictionary provides you with the phonological transcription of a word, it usually adds ‘stress symbols.' Stress symbols are always placed before the sound that is stressed. The primary stress symbol looks like a simple quotation mark ( ˈ ) while the secondary stress symbol looks like a comma ( ˌ ). In order to tell you that the word "language," for instance, is pronounced "LANguage" and not "lanGUAge" or "languaGE," the dictionary will transcribe that word as /ˈlængwiʤ/ (notice the stress symbol placed before the first syllable to indicate that it is on that one that the stress falls).

As you can see with the example of "language", there is only one primary stress in that word. Although in some words there is a secondary stress in front of the primary stress (eg: ˌeduˈcation), there are no stressed syllables after the primary stress, ever (even if the word is long, eg: ˈcharacterise).

The next tabs have useful and simple word stress rules, but before you go to them, bear in mind this one: 

RULE: A word cannot begin with two unstressed syllables.

This means that regardless how long a word is, it will necessarily have some kind of stress (primary or secondary) on one of the first two syllables. Now let's have a look at what determines where the stress falls...

RULE: -ionendings make the primary stress fall on the syllable preceding that ending.

The -ion rule means that words like "education" "motivation" "contemplation" and "population" will necessarily have a primary stress on the ‘a' sound:

Edu'cation

Moti'vation

Contem'plation

Popu'lation

Refor'mation

However, because a word cannot begin with two unstressed syllables, a secondary stress necessarily falls on one of the first two syllables. Usually, if possible, there is an unstressed syllable between the secondary and primary stress, as is the case with all those words (click on the words to hear them pronounced):

‚Edu'cation

‚Moti'vation

‚Contem'plation

‚Popu'lation

‚Refor'mation

In order to say how a word is stressed, the following code is useful:

                0 - for an unstressed syllable

                1 - for the syllable carrying the primary stress

                2 - for the syllable carrying the secondary stress (if there is one)

The stress pattern of all the words above is therefore "2010" (see graph below with "education" as an example). Note that this code is used in the "Exercise" tab further along.

RULE: The following grammatical endings do not change the stress pattern.

This means that the stress pattern of the root word is kept even after the ending is added. That is to say, "ˈpersonalise" or "ˈpersonally" are stressed exactly like "ˈperson": on the first syllable. Adding a grammatical ending has no impact on how the word is stressed.

Here are a few examples of grammatical endings:

-ED (pro'vision => pro'visioned)

-AL (const'tution => consti'tutional)

-LY ('global => 'globally)

-ISE ('character => 'characterise)

-NESS (com'petitive => com'petitiveness)

-LESS ('meaning => 'meaningless)

-FUL ('sorrow => 'sorrowful)

Here is an additional stress-related rule:

RULE: the schwa (/Ə/) cannot be stressed.

This is a useful rule to bear in mind because it allows you to know that in words like "reformation" for instance, neither the 'e' nor the 'a' will be pronounced schwa (/Ə/) because the syllable 'RE' carries a secondary stress and 'MA' carries the primary stress. The syllable 'FOR' in "reformation", however, does not carry any stress; as is often the case in such a situation, the vowel sound there is reduced and pronounced /Ə/: reformation. A word like "contemplation" behaves in exactly the same way: the syllables 'CON' and 'PLA' are stressed (secondary and primary stress) so they are pronounced strong. In-between these, the syllable 'TEM', which is unstressed, has its vowel sound reduced to the schwa sound (/Ə/): contemplation.

We have seen above that if you know how a word is stressed, you also know that the syllable on which the stress falls cannot be pronounced /Ə/. This also works the other way around: if you know that a syllable is pronounced /Ə/, you can conclude that it is not a stressed syllable.

In a word like "about" for example, the syllable ‘A' is pronounced /Ə/ so the stress necessarily falls on the other syllable, ‘BOUT'. The stress code for "about" is thus 01 and the word is pronounced: about.