refuse

For the next several days, we're going to look at one word per day which, when you put the stress on a different syllable, drastically changes its meaning, even though both forms are spelled exactly the same. That's a long sentence, isn't it? I'm not fond of that. Anyway. . .

This is one of those oddities that makes English such a difficult language for non-native speakers to learn.

The first one is "refuse." If I pronounce it "re-FUSE," it means "to reject" or "to turn down." Hey, "reject" is the same type of word -- "RE-ject" and "re-JECT." Funny.

If, however, I put the stress on the first syllable, "REF-use," it means "trash" or "garbage." There are a whole host of words in the language such as this.

We'll look at four more common ones, so don't refuse to read because you think this is just a bunch of refuse. You figure out which is which.