“Queueing is such a hard word!” I admit, I’ve said it out loud a couple of times at our office while typing. If your eyes jump on the letters as much as mine do, ‘queueing’ is the continuous form of the verb ‘to queue’, not the participle to describe the state of something. And well, our work is to get the queues moving!
‘Queueing’ is the only English word having more than four consecutive vowels, which is quite ironic, and I’ll tell you why.
It is good practice for typing, but how about when we pronounce it?
Vowels in a queue. [ˈvaʊəlz ɪn ə kju:]
Vowels queueing. [ˈvaʊəlz] ˈkju:ɪŋ]
For those, who are not familiar with International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) here is a site that reads it out loud for you: English to IPA. In case you want to read out loud the IPA (those scribbles in the brackets), here is a site from IPA to English.
Yes, at first queueing might seem like a hard word, but when you say it out loud, it does not have so many separate pieces anymore, right?
Queues are quite simple, really. When you just type “Q”, it is pronounced like the whole word [kju:]! Then we add the -ing [‘ɪŋ] , and get the Q moving!
We want to make “I am queueing” as easy as it is to say it out loud. We take care of the writing part, just tell us where you want to go, or where you want to have your customers Q-ing! 🙂
Have a great April!
Jasmin
This post was originally posted by Jasmin Ruokolainen on Jonoon.fi’s blog at this link.