The lexical set is one of the twenty-four lexical sets defined by John C. Wells in Accents of English that are in wide usage among phonologists and phoneticians.
Contents
Spelling
The following are the typical spellings of words in the KIT lexical set.
The following spellings are frequent in KIT words, but more commonly spell words in other lexical sets.
The following are KIT words with unique or very unusual spellings:
Distribution
The KIT lexical set contains a so-called checked vowel: in other words, the stressed vowel must always be followed immediately by a consonant (other than nonprevocalic /r/).
Mergers
The KIT lexical set is merged with other lexical sets in the following accents:
Redistributions
In some North American accents, words where the KIT vowel immediately precedes a velar nasal (e.g. king) are assigned the FLEECE vowel rather than the KIT vowel. Because there is no contrast between KIT and FLEECE in this environment, this is classified as a redistribution rather than a merger.
Realizations
In RP and conservative North American speech, the KIT lexical set is realized as [ɪ]. Notably different realizations include:
In accents that retain phonological length distinctions (e.g. most accents of England, Wales and southern Ireland), the KIT vowel is short, being distinguished from the FLEECE vowel [iː] by length as well as by quality.
Phonological history
Most words in the KIT lexical set derive from the vowel /i/ ("short I") of Middle English. This includes nearly all words spelled with i.
England and English were already pronounced /i/ by 1500: they, along with wing and fling were earlier pronounced with /e/.
Many words in the NURSE lexical set (most of those spelled ir) were pronounced /ir/ in Middle English, before the fern-fir-fur merger.