This is a “short” or “checked” vowel sound, so is always followed by a consonant.
orce as in Worcestershire
3 thoughts on “oo”
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Wool is it short or long oo?
According to my resources it is short. The long sound of oo spells moon, soon etc.
Also its harder to stretch the short sound out over 30 seconds or so, thus short length of time.
The long oo in moon can be stretched out longer (if you take a big breath beforehand) and
thus it is long. Hope that helps.
“Short” and “long” are kind of misnomers because the “short” sounds are not shorter-in-time versions of the “long” sounds, they are completely different sounds. The reason the “short” sounds are perceived as short is that they must always be followed by a consonant. You can’t have the vowels in “hat”, “wet”, “big”, “hot”, “bus” or “put” at the end of a syllable or word. In linguistics they are called “checked vowels”.