DialectGuessr

Pronunciation

H-Dropping: Do You Say “House” or “'Ouse”?

H-dropping covers most of England and Wales in working-class speech and is one of the most socially loaded features in British English. Scotland, Ireland, North America, Australia and New Zealand keep the H, which is why the feature reads as specifically English rather than generally informal.

The question, as everyone in the survey sees it

In relaxed speech, do you pronounce the H at the start of “house”?

Think about your normal conversation, not your most careful pronunciation.

Answer it yourself and see where you land on the map →

Which accents do what

Each accent profile in the survey has an expected answer to this question. Where a profile allows more than one answer, the region genuinely varies.

Yes — I pronounce the H

In these profiles, the H in “house” is pronounced.

No — it sounds like “ouse”

In these profiles, “house” sounds like “ouse”, without the H.

It varies

In these profiles, the H in “house” is sometimes pronounced and sometimes left out.

Why this question is in the survey

Pronunciation questions carry more weight in the scoring than vocabulary questions do, because they are much harder to change deliberately. People move house and pick up new words; the vowel system learned in childhood tends to stay. Every answer is stored with a coarse map cell for the town you grew up in, and a region is coloured in once at least two people there have answered.

See the full question bank, the accent profiles these answers feed, or how the scoring works.