not its spelling. Spelling will help you predict the number of syllables in an unfamiliar word because most words in English are spelled with some regard for pronunciation--but it will often lead you astray. Leicestershire, Worcestershire, Featherstonehaugh, Chomondelay etc. are famous examples (three, three, two and two respectively). posted by yoink at 2:06 PM on January 3 I made a typo. In my neck of the woods, y'all is always plural, with the ambiguous exception where an individual is being addressed as a representative of others or an institution. Some people have attested to singular y'all , but I've personally never heard it outside of clumsy television attempts at Southern dialect and I remain a bit suspicious about its existence. "Also, what the inside of your mouth is doing when you pronounce a word may not be evident to the person you're speaking to. It may sound exactly the same as when you do something slightly different with the inside of your mouth, eg flower, flour. So you think ypu're saying it differently, but it sounds the same to your audience." As a Canadian, you no doubt had Canadian raising in mind when you wrote the above. It's a good example of this because while the (non-upper-midwest) Americans hear "a-boot" when a Canadian says "about", the different pronunciation of those two, er, words ( boot and bout ) is quite distinct to a Canadian. That's because those Americans don't really have that particular diphthong phoneme in their speech and so