pronunciation - How to pronounce "worried"?

I have no idea whatsoever about IPA, so I apologise now for any ambiguity or difficult-to-understand-ness in this question.

Me and a friend both disagree on the correct pronunciation of "worried". I pronounce it "worried", he pronounces it "wurried". I shall expand:

1. My pronunciation: if you will, rhymes with "lorry". Lorry, worry (woh-reed)


2. His pronunciation: if you will, rhymes with "curry". Curry, worry (wu-reed, wuh-reed)

Once again, I apologise if you think these explanations are awful, but they were the best I could do.

(We speak standard English, at least I think we do). We have no northern, western, midlands etc. accents. We come from the south east, if that's of any help.

I'm also not passing the fact that they could both be correct and that it doesn't matter, but it'd be interesting to know which one is correct.

Answer

In North America, worry most often rhymes with furry, blurry, and slurry. That’s the same vowel as in fur, blur, and slur ’round these parts. This is also the same vowel as the one in yer, per, purr, her, sir, sure, fir, burr, knur, slur, whirr, and were. In fact our worry sounds pretty much just like “were” with an extra -y tacked on to the end. Now just add a d for worried, and you’re done.

In contrast, the North American worry usually does not rhyme with any of sorry, quarry, lorry, berry, bury, curie, carry, Carrie, dairy, ferry, glory, Rory, story, cherry, Terry, tarry, very, wary, weary, marry, merry, Mary, Harry, or Laurie — nor even with Larry, Moe, or Curly.

Lastly, the North American worry almost certainly does not rhyme with an Indian sari.

Beyond that, your mileage may, can, will, and surely shall vary. And why sure, I could give you the IPA for my version of worry and worried (respectively /ˈwɜɹi/ and /ˈwɜɹid/), but you said you don’t understand IPA symbols. This makes it next to impossible to talk about pronunciations, because you have no symbolic way of specifying pronunciations. That’s probably why you’ve received no answers yet.

However, even if you did know what the IPA symbols actually meant, they might not do you as much good as you might think: many of those words themselves have multiple possible pronunciations, depending on various mergers and regional accents.

The best I can do is give you rhyme-sets, but mine and thine are surely miles, leagues, and even oceans apart, so what good would that do you if I did? So I can’t tell you how you “should” pronounce worry, per your request. Then again, nobody else can do that either, so I don’t feel so bad.

At best, I can only tell you how I do so. Which is what I’ve tried to do.

I guarantee you that many people reading this won’t pronounce all / many / some / any of these the way I myself do anyway. So please don’t think I expect you to pronounce it like me, of course; I expect you to pronounce it like worry. :)

All joking aside, I don’t know what more you are looking for here. You may wish to update your question a bit so that it can be answered.