How do you pronounce ‘Cirencester’ and ‘Marylebone’?

‘Half! Half! Half!’ exclaimed my husband like a performing sea lion. Not that sea lions perform any more, but you get the simile. He was emphasising the pronunciation of the first syllable of Hertford, which, as he rightly said, has no T sound.

He had worked himself up because on Twitter there was a froth about the way to pronounce some place-names: Hawarden as Harden, Wemyss as Weems, Marylebone as Marrabun and Cirencester as Sissister.

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

I agreed about Marylebone, though in 1909 the philologist Otto Jespersen noted that ‘now the l is often sounded’. In 1981, Klaus Forster in his Pronouncing Dictionary of English Place-Names gave 11 pronunciations of Marylebone with the l sounded and five without. There is no doubt that the name was originally Mary-burn, ‘Mary’s stream’, and the -le- was a post-medieval intrusion.