It is completely ridiculous that the preferred pronunciation of 'primer' when referring to a textbook is 'PRIM-er' (to rhyme with 'rimmer'). Fortunately 78% of you disagree and pronounce it sensibly as 'PRIME-er'. Unfortunately I am in the minority on this one. Like virtually everyone, I pronounced this word as PRIME-er as a child (we used to get Primer Print brand pencils to write in our books, although I don't recall us actually using the word to describe the books). However, somewhere along the line I learned that it was PRIM-er and that stuck with me.

Of course, most of us have little occasion to use the word primer in this sense, so it is one of those rarely-encountered words that we often pronounce by sight. This can lead to considerable variation in pronunciation. However, the main source of interference in this case is the existence of an identically-spelled word primer such as is used to refer to an undercoat of paint, which is the ordinary verb prime with the -er suffix to denote a noun that performs a particular activity or action.

But even if there were no such word, the often-broken rules of English orthography would lead most of us to pronounce it as PRIME-er. If we consider the nonexistent word *spimer, most native English speakers would pronounce it with the [ai] sound, whereas we would know that *spimmer is pronounced with the 'shorter' [ɪ] vowel sound. We know this intuitively because most English two-syllable words follow the same pattern (cf. later/latter, sloping/slopping, fury/furry). PRIM-er is a serious exception to this rule. At one point 'primmer' was an acceptable alternate spelling - but only prior to the 18th century, a period of English orthography well-known for its lack of fixed forms, so we have prymer, prymar, prymere, premere, primare, primere, primier,and prymmer as well. The rules just didn't work the same way prior to about 1700.

Initially I wondered whether PRIM-er was a British pronunciation, but in fact I've learned it's just the opposite: My poll confirms what my research has also suggested, that the PRIM-er pronunciation is North American in origin. All of the 'PRIM-er' respondents were North American English speakers. Where this distinctive pronunciation comes from, I really couldn't say. The etymology of primer is quite simple; it's from medieval Latin primarius and ultimately from Latin primus - from which we get primary and, of course, prime/primer in the other sense. While it originally referred to an elementary prayer-book for laypeople, the sense was later extended to elementary schoolbooks. So it's not a case of it not being related to other 'prime' words. There are other 'prime' words that are pronounced 'prim', such as primitive, but with longer words, the rules are more complex and you can't rely on orthography as a guide to pronunciation - one could imagine pronouncing 'primitive' as PRIME-i-tive with little difficulty. (As aside, those of you who play the Vampire RPG will no doubt have encountered the alternatives PRIME-o-gen and PRIM-o-gen for 'primogen', which isn't even a real English word but a bizarre backformation from primogeniture.)

Ultimately, what's going on with PRIM-er today is very simple: an irregular pronunciation is being replaced for two reasons: a) interference with the other primer and b) because rarely encountered in speech, we tend to pronounce it as spelled. It is thus surprising that most dictionaries still list PRIM-er as the preferred pronunciation (many list it as the only one), but that situation is likely to change given the infrequency of the 'correct' variant's use.

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