The extra vowel in LOOSE has no effect at all on length other than perhaps to confuse learners. The /uː/ in LOSE /luːz/ is in fact longer that the same sound in LOOSE /luːs/, as the first word ends in a voiced consonant /z/ and the second in a voiceless /s/.

One peculiar pair of words that can confuse learners for this reason, is LOSE and LOOSE. This means that the supposedly ‘long’ vowel in PEACE is actually normally shorter than the ‘short’ vowel in HID even though you will see them transcribed as /piːs/ and /hɪd/ in dictionaries. So compare CARD with CART, BEAN with BEAT and NO with NOTE and you will notice that the second word in each pair was shorter. Most noticeably, whenever a voiceless consonant sound /p,t,k,f,s,θ,ʃ,h,tʃ/ comes after a vowel, it makes its length shorter. Listen to the different lengths of the sounds /ɪ/ and /iː/ from longest to shortest: LONGEST leave /liːv/ The consonant sound directly after a vowel sound will affect its length. English contains 6 single (monophthong) vowel sounds that are normally short(ish): /ɪ/ in PITĥ monophthong vowels that are normally a bit longer /iː/ in FEETĪnd 7 double position long vowels (diphthongs) which are normally slightly longer still: /eɪ/ in FAME,Įach of these sounds will change length in connected speech, for three main reasons, as we will now see: i) VOICING

Generally speaking, some vowel sounds tend to be longer than others, but no vowel sound has a fixed length and many other factors affect length, as we are about to see.

OK, let’s have a go everyone: SHIP, SHEEP. In a normal, (citation) context, in which no special intonation is added to the words, it is true that SHEEP will generally be a tiny bit longer than SHIP, but I really mean a tiny bit – a few milliseconds. The key difference is the lower position of the jaw and more central position of the tongue in /ɪ/ the position of the mouth is always different. So the /ɪ/ vowel sound in SHIP is not necessarily shorter than the /iː/ vowel in SHEEP, this is not then the main difference between them.

What is a long vowel