THE SOUND |U|
as the first sound in oomph and umlaut

See also |OO| and the note on |OO| and |U| below

With primary stress on:

first syllable:

OOMPH; OOPS [var:cp |OO|]; UM-LAUT(S)

|OO| and |U|

The adjacent sounds |OO| and |U| do not often distinguish words from the spoken language in meaning. There are many more words in which the vowel can be pronounced as either |OO| or |U| than pairs of words whose meanings depend on whether the vowel is |OO| instead of |U|. Words such as broom, coop, groom, hoof, hoop, oops, roof, room, root, whoop and woof may be pronounced with either |OO| or |U| in the present language, altho, of course, not in all its dialects. Thus, |BROOM| has precisely the same meaning as |BRUM| (namely, that of broom). Nonetheless, the sounds |OO| and |U| differentiate semantically in |FOOL| (fool) versus |FUL| (full) and in |POOL| (pool) versus |PUL| (pull). These words would have been 'homonyms' in the spoken language, if the difference between |OO| and |U| had not mattered. Yet, in these pairs it is usually also the grammatical category which differs, the two words with |OO| being nouns and the two with |U| being an adjective, adverb or verb. Only if |POOL| (to pool) is used as a verb as well, will the speaker or listener have to depend much more on the difference between the sound |OO| and the sound |U|, something that is even more so the case in |SOOT| (suit) versus |SUT| (soot), which can both have the function of a noun or a verb. Because of word pairs such as |SOOT| and |SUT|, with the difference in meaning between suit and soot, the sounds |OO| and |U| must be considered separate phonemes. On the whole, however, the distinction between them is definitely less important than the one between, for example, |EE| (as in eat) and |I| (as in it), which are adjacent phonemic vowels too.