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parlour

Noun
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A formal sitting room in a house for receiving guests; in poetry, it evokes domestic order, polite society, and the staging of private life within a defined social space.

Detailed Definition
Parlour is an older term for a room used for receiving guests or for quiet domestic use. In nineteenth-century writing it often evokes a respectable, middle-class interior.
Example
Example in poetry:
“The summer-parlour looks so dark” presents a parlour as a domestic sitting room; “In the parlour, portraits watched the tea go cold” evokes Victorian interiors; Older poems use parlour to stage courtship, mourning, and family performance; “Her grandmother’s parlour became a studio for spoken-word rehearsals” renews the room’s social meaning.
Additional Notes
In “The summer-parlour looks so dark,” the room name is an older domestic term that many modern readers may not use regularly.; Found in the poem, The Letter by Charlotte Brontë
Also Known As
drawing room sitting room parlor salon
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