Memorable Schwa Sets:

#11  'Today Or Tomorrow?'

#11  'Today Or Tomorrow?'

This is a multi-part series on 'Selectively Lazy English'. If you're new, you can jump back to the first set of resources ... or start at the very beginning with my intro article.

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lazy schwa words

  TIP:     It's a good idea listen to the audio without looking at the written examples – at least when you start.

We pronounce the highlighted spelling patterns with a lazy schwa vowel in all of the word examples below, and in all contexts – even if a speaker wants to heavily emphasise the word.


-to  today, tomorrow, tonight, towards, together

Also:  tobacco, topology

Words in the -to list above are few, but extremely common words we use every day. And in these words (e.g. today), the ‘to’ seems to act as a prefix.

This fact might remind you of the weak schwa form of the word ‘to’ when 'to' is paired with verbs or nouns:

weak form of 'to'   to go, to say, to be  /  to me, to you, to Paris

There are other words where ‘to’ is simply part of the word: in that case, a schwa may occasionally be used (see the Also list above), but often there may be no schwa in that part of the word, as in the exceptions below.

lazy schwa sentences:

We’re working towards organising a get-together – are you free today or tomorrow? Is tonight too early?

exception words:

-to  topic, torrent, tolerant, toxic, total

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