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Vilui Since: May, 2009
2025-07-22 13:03:06

I never knew this before, but yes, that's right.

GnomeTitan Since: Aug, 2013
2025-07-22 14:54:31

Except that if you transcribe the IPA into letters, ”wuh-bee” seems an odd choice. I think most people would pronounce ”wuh” with a shwa sound, or am I totally off?

Vilui Since: May, 2009
2025-07-22 15:06:59

I get where you're coming from, but unfortunately there is no perfectly unambiguous way to transcribe /ʊ/. (For those who don't know, it's the vowel in woof or put.) This kind of thing is why I dislike English-spelling transcriptions altogether.

Edited by Vilui
Reymma Since: Feb, 2015
2025-07-22 16:57:21

However that's not the right transcription, for most English speakers (that is, outside the North of England) the vowel is not /ʊ/ but /ʌ/. The word is meant to be a child's distortion of "love".

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
MagnoliaBloom91 (Apprentice)
2025-07-23 08:28:47

To be honest, I'm not even sure why that's even on the page. Not only is there a lot of dialectal variation in English, it also just seems pointless to me. If I had the final say, it could be removed. That's just my opinion though.

Prequel apologist | I like fixing up YMMV and Trivia pages.
underCoverSailsman Since: Jan, 2021
2025-07-23 13:11:03

Dialectal variation is right. In my region of NA, "woof" definitely rhymes with moon and floof, not fluff. I'd pronounce it WOO-bee, and if you say it differently would ask why you don't spell it wubie.

Reymma Since: Feb, 2015
2025-07-23 13:49:09

^^ But it's not a matter of dialect, the word isn't old or widespread enough to have historic variations, only synchronic ones. And the problem is that the spelling is misleading; it really should have been "wubby".

^ Does your dialect distinguish the vowels of "good", "food" and "mud"? They merge in various dialects, but it's helpful to know into what merged phoneme the word fits.

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
MB74 Since: Feb, 2024
2025-07-23 13:52:59

I’m not even sure why the proper pronunciation is needed to begin with, it can easily be removed

I’ll lift my face, and run to the sunlight.
Vilui Since: May, 2009
2025-07-23 14:30:43

Because it's interesting information? I had no idea until I looked it up last night.

^x6 Are you saying that it's pronounced with /ʌ/ in the film Mr. Mom (where it originates)? I haven't seen the film so I have no idea whether that is true.

Florestan Since: May, 2015
2025-07-23 14:47:11

Huh, interesting. But if "woobie" was perhaps intended to sound similar to "lovey-dovey" (in a sort of baby-speak), it's strange it was spelled with "oo", which usually denotes a noticeably different sound in most varieties of English. But anyway, since this is a relatively recent word, who gets to say what is the official "correct" pronunciation? Different people may pronounce it in different ways, which is fine. (Reminds me of the fight about the correct pronunciation of GIF, the image format.)

Edited by Florestan
underCoverSailsman Since: Jan, 2021
2025-07-23 14:50:23

^x4 "Mud" and "food" are definitely different - the first is pronounced with slack lips near the back of the tongue, and the later with tense lips - as if blowing out a candle - near the front of the tongue. "Good" floats kind of in between, sometimes depending on speaker. Of course, for a fluent speaker the exact pronunciation does shift depending on the surrounding phonemes.

Listening to the wiktionary entry up in post two, the sample speaker is pronouncing about 3/4 of the way forward, toward Woo..

On topic, I agree that this whole thing is irrelevant on the wiki. I'd cut the line.

Edited by underCoverSailsman
ArielLightning Since: Nov, 2014
2025-07-23 15:02:15

I've always pronounced it as "WOO-bee" because that's how it's spelled. Pronouncing it as "WUH-bee" seems counter-intuitive to me.

Reymma Since: Feb, 2015
2025-07-23 16:05:29

^^ "mud" in RP and American Standard is a back half-open unrounded vowel. ("Unrounded" refers to the lips, and it's unusual for back vowels.) "food" is back close rounded. "good" is also back close rounded, but laxer and shorter. Yes, the realisation changes, but that is a matter of phonetics, here what matters is the phonology, what categories the vowels fall into for speakers. The three vowels are distinct phonemes in the prestige dialects of English.

And there is a correct pronunciation, because of where the word comes from. It's not comparable to "GIF", which is an acronym and its reading is arbitrary. We have a similar note for The Ingenue.

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
wingedcatgirl MOD (Holding A Herring)
2025-07-23 19:19:39

I mean I wouldn't say it's a matter of "correct" and "incorrect" pronunciation so much as matching the source or not. English words are pronounced in particular ways not because of anything inherent to them, but because people pronounce them that way. We don't have a central authority like e.g. French does.

That said, I've never seen any other English word transcribe that phoneme as "oo".

Edited by wingedcatgirl Suddenly I'm... still rotating Fallen London in my mind even though I've stopped actively playing it.
Vilui Since: May, 2009
2025-07-23 19:30:59

Book, cook, foot, foresook, good, hook, look, rook, soot... it feels like it's spelled "oo" more commonly than "u".

The note on the page doesn't use the word "correct" at all, but looking again, I can see how it can be read as trying to prescribe a "correct" pronunciation, so I'd be in favour of replacing it with a note like the one on The Ingenue.

Edited by Vilui
Kuruni (Long Runner)
2025-07-23 21:30:55

Lets people read it however they want, it isn't like we can do snything to people who misread it. In fact, I will read it as wo-o-bi-e from now on, since it sound cool.

Vilui Since: May, 2009
2025-07-23 21:35:22

Again, the point of a note is not to be snooty about "correct" pronunciation or to tell people off, it's to inform, because the information may be interesting. I don't know why everyone is reacting like I'm being horrible just because I think this information is good to have.

harryhenry Since: Jan, 2012
2025-07-24 02:11:41

^ You're not being horrible for pointing this out, and I don't think anyone is thinking that. I think it's more just the nature of prescriptive language pronunciations. They're inherently pedantic and dictatic, no matter how nicely they're worded.

Edited by harryhenry
TMH-Sir-Iron-Vomit Since: Mar, 2024
2025-07-24 03:18:03

I also wonder if there's a way to keep it, and maybe also explain the origin and evolution of the word — and its pronunciation/spelling.

...Can I just say English is the worst fucking language in history?

Oo oo ah ah
GearFriedTheKnight (Experienced Trainee)
2025-07-24 03:36:43

^ I can't tell if French is the way it is because of West Germanic influences or in spite of them. If the former, then yes, English is an immature mess of a language (why do people pronounce "Knight" without putting emphasis on the K? Why aren't more languages like the Romance ones where you spell it as you pronounce it and viceversa?)
Anyways, I personally pronounced it "wu-bi" all along (Double O becomes "U", the E is silent) through a weird mish-mash of Italian and English. A pronounciation guide is not something I'd be in favour of, but the etymological history of the word? Absolutely. More tropes would benefit from it and from explanations of their names.

''There's no magic in tuning; yet, it's something that tends to escape from any logic."
Reymma Since: Feb, 2015
2025-07-24 12:59:12

^^^^^^ That's for /ʊ/, though. /ʌ/ is sometimes <oo> like in "flood", but is more usually <u> followed by a word-terminal consonant or a double one. It's a weird spelling choice, though it would make sense if it comes from someone who doesn't distinguish the two phonemes.

^^ English phonology is beautiful. It's just burdened with the worst spelling of any European language.

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
Florien Since: Aug, 2019
2025-07-24 14:50:48

^^^ Read Tibetan or Georgian, they get way worse about this because they formalized spelling really long ago.

But I think it doesn't matter, the note could stay or go, and without it the pronunciation will drift to the obvious one.

Either way it's not going to make it difficult to talk about the idea the trope is meant to convey.

inbeforedash (Season 1)
2025-07-24 18:16:34

my take is that people may think the first part looks like the words woof, wool, wood, etc., which are all pronounced /wu:/, and in their intuition, thinks should be pronounced the same so /wu:bi/

Edited by inbeforedash "T'u gadapmagazin imhat pimushikimp'alha. K'animhat t'u k'ak'ujvn kimkap'akilteĭmvmpüca."
Adept MOD (Holding A Herring)
2025-07-24 23:34:16

Don't different dialects often pronounce things differently anyway? As harryhenry says, including the pronunciation rules seems pedantic.

inbeforedash (Season 1)
2025-07-25 00:41:34

yeah. (to clarify, i wasn't being prescriptive) its honestly a weird spelling for me so...

Edited by inbeforedash "T'u gadapmagazin imhat pimushikimp'alha. K'animhat t'u k'ak'ujvn kimkap'akilteĭmvmpüca."
Madison14 Since: Dec, 2015
2025-07-25 04:58:18

Since "woobie" is mostly internet slang, I'm guessing far more people have seen it in text than have heard it spoken anywhere, so it makes sense that the pronunciation would shift to match the spelling. I wish someone would do a poll asking people how they think it's pronounced. (I've been mentally saying /wubi/ for over a decade.)

LordGro (Old as dirt)
2025-07-25 17:46:11

I don' think it's pedantic to drop a hint on pronunciation if the term in question is established in spoken use outside of TV Tropes and has an established pronunciation which is not intuitive. In fact, I would go further and say that when these criteria are met, I would expect to find this information in a well-written TV Tropes article. The Woobie seems to be such a case.

However, what strikes me about the current pronunciation note is that "WUH-bee" seems to be a bad transcription. You can check for yourself how the word is spoken in Mr. Mom (it's a short <u>, like in "put" or "sugar"). But my intuition would tell me to pronounce the vowel in "WUH" like the one in "duh", and that is definitely not the right sound.

The phonetic script seems to be correct (not an expert, though). "WUH-bee" seems confusing rather than helpful, though. The note would be much clearer if it simply said that the vowel of the first syllable is short, not long.

Vilui Since: May, 2009
2025-07-25 18:53:07

Okay, so it is /ʊ/, good to have that confirmed.

Unfortunately, English vowels are traditionally called by rather inaccurate names; say "short u" and people will think /ʌ/.

Lymantria Since: Apr, 2015
2025-07-25 23:57:14

I would support using IPA if people will understand it (will they).

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WarJay77 (Troper Knight)
2025-07-26 00:11:14

Frankly I think it's a bit silly to try and enforce the way people pronounce words we're all just saying in our heads anyway.

Also I've never been able to understand IPA personally, nothing against using it but it's kind of just unhelpful for people like me who don't know what sounds the symbols are meant to reference unless I already know the word (at which point it's redundant).

Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
Lymantria Since: Apr, 2015
2025-07-26 01:55:38

I know IPA reasonably well, and personally prefer it to less precise methods of representing pronunciation, but I get that it might be inaccessible to some. Right now the page has both IPA and simple respelling, which is probably good for most people, but I agree that “uh” for /ʊ/ (the sound in “wood”) might not be the best choice, since people might think it means /ʌ/ (the sound in “up”). I admit that that sound is a bit hard to respell in a way that can’t be misinterpreted, since “oo” could be interpreted as /u/ (the sound in “food”) - “uu” might work which is what Wikipedia uses in respellings, but I’m not sure if there are any English words that are actually spelled with it, which might make it unintuitive. Ultimately, if people don’t think the pronunciation note is necessary at all, maybe it could go. It was helpful to me, though.

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LordGro (Old as dirt)
2025-09-03 01:17:00

Trying to wrap this query up. How do you feel about replacing these two paragraphs:

For the curious, the fanspeak term "woobie" is ultimately derived from a word for a blanket, stuffed animal, or other soft object that a child keeps for its comforting properties (hence the name—some of these characters really could use a snuggling!).

Also, it's pronounced /ˈwʊbi/ ("WUH-bee"), not /ˈwuːbi/ ("WOO-bee").

with this one:

The name "Woobie" has its origin in the 80's comedy Mr. Mom, where it was a child's name for their comfort blanket. From this, fanspeak has appropriated the term for a character that just makes you want to snuggle them. Spread over the internet has lead to the word often being pronounced as rhyming with "booby" (/ˈwuːbi/), but it deserves mention that per the original pronunciation, the "oo" is short, as in "Woody" (/ˈwʊbi/).

Edited by LordGro
BoltDMC Since: May, 2020
Jerry Since: Aug, 2013
2025-09-03 01:58:08

From a non-english speaker perspective, I consider this a significant improvement.

LOAD"WITTYFORUMSIGNATURE",8,1 FILE NOT FOUND ERROR
Vilui Since: May, 2009
2025-09-03 02:11:24

I'm fine with that, except that "80s" should have no apostrophe.

Willbyr MOD (Y2K)
Acebrock Since: Dec, 2009
lexii Since: Jul, 2009
2025-09-04 12:18:07

Looks great, and I love the associated trivia.

Dirtyblue929 Since: Dec, 2012
2025-09-04 13:06:26

Definitely a better version than the current. I'd say go ahead and replace.

LordGro (Old as dirt)
2025-09-05 00:50:41

As all the feedback was positive, I have swapped in my rewrite. I guess this query can be locked now.

bwburke94 (Y2: Electric Boogaloo)
2025-09-05 06:13:09

Yep, this mess is finally over with.

2025: the year it all ends?
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