Lexical sets

A lexical set is a set of words which are pronounced with the same vowel in the reference accents. The name of the set is a keyword selected from the set, and written in SMALL CAPS. Non-standard lexical sets are shown in bold.

Original lexical sets
John Wells invented the following lexical sets for Received Pronunciation and General American.

(*) The FORCE vowel is a separate phoneme (/oː/ sounding [oː] or [oə]) in very few locations, and it is not currently present in General American. John Wells said it was present in General American in then-current reference This is useful for other dialects, such as Scotish English or Irish English, which have the FORCE phoneme as well.

Adapted table
If we consider the Cot-caught merger, the Mary-marry-merry merger and other mergers (mirror-nearer, hurry-furry) we have the following table for stressed vowels.

(r) is silent before a consonant and at the end of the word.

Lexical sets sorted by type of syllable
(VrV) The words including VrV in this column are compound words (or recent loans), except for rows PRICE and MOUTH (examples "spiral" and "dowry")


 * 1) is the end of the word

Lexical sets in other parts of the United States
If we consider the marry-merry merger and the cot-caught merger the lexical sets are distributed as follows.

Unstressed vowels
Wells also describes three sets of words based on their word-final unstressed vowels.