Another free Saturday, so a chance to say Nigella Lawson was on TV when I switched it on this morning.

And she mentioned liquorice, which she pronounced more-or-less as “likorish.”

Of course many Southerners do this but I don’t recall ever hearing this way of saying the word until I went to visit my cousins on England’s South Coast in nineteen hundred and long time ago. It’s bugged me ever since.

No-one, for example, says rice with a “sh” sound at the end.

Anyway, Nigella moved me to look the word up and my dictionary (Chambers Twentieth Century, 1972) gives the pronunciation as “lik’ ə-ris (in US also -rish)” so Nigella and all those Southerners are actually saying it the American way.

Why?

(Of course my Chambers was a Scottish publication but it doesn’t give lik’ ə-rish as an English form of pronunciation. It does also give the alternative spelling licorice.)