As many of you suspected, zough is not a real English word. It does, however, have 5830 Google hits (more on that later). The poll was a bit of an experiment to see how people would pronounce a potentially real English non-word including a phonetically ambiguous letter sequence, in this case, 'ough'.

For a while, it was pretty close, but over the past couple of days, 'zoe' has taken the lead with 36% of respondents, 'zow' in second with 22%, 'zoff' in third (17%) and 'zuff' fourth (16%). Only three people chose 'zoo', which I thought was interesting; one might have thought that, since it is the only pronunciation that is also an English word, it might be more popular. Clearly, however, your minds don't work that way, and that explanation can't be right.

As anyone with even a passing familiarity with English knows, 'ough' can be pronounced in numerous ways. There is a poem, apparently entitled 'The Chaos', one version of which begins

Dearest creature in Creation,
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse

... and which ends, appropriately enough ...

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!

In fact, this annotated version of the poem tells me that there are no fewer than fourteen different pronunciations of 'ough' - some, however, like 'awe' only occur before 't' (ought, bought, fought) and others are quite rare (such as hiccough, which is more commonly spelled hiccup today anyhow). But that still leaves at least five (bough, cough, dough, rough, through) that are relatively common and occur at the end of words.

So, back to zough. It was actually remarkably difficult to choose an appropriately neutral initial consonant, but z, I think, does the trick pretty well. My one concern, may have been partly well-founded, is that the pronunciation 'zoe' might get a boost because of the similarity between the eth [ð] of though and the [z] of zough, which are similar sounds. This can be seen quite easily in the Google hits for zough, many of which are transcriptions of foreign mispronunciations (e.g. 'Don't eat too much zough, I'm saving ze cake until later!'). So this is one possible reason why 'zoe' might win out - but for this to be true, we have to assume that people read zough, transliterate it somehow to though, and then 'mispronounce' the transliteration - or, alternately, that people are unconsciously familiar with zough as a spelling of though and just remember it once they see it.

Another possibility is strictly by the numbers. Perhaps the most popular -ough pronunciation (in terms of common words) is also the most popular choice for zough. Let's see how that works:

'oh': though, although, dough, thorough, borough (also furlough)
'ow': bough, plough (also sough)
'off': cough, trough
'uff': enough, rough, tough (also chough, slough)
'oo': through (also slough)

While 'oh' is the most common pronunciation of word-final 'ough', it's not by a lot, and the argument really breaks down if we were also to try to explain the ranking of the second through fifth-place choices. 'ow', the second most popular, has only the relatively uncommon 'bough' and 'plough', whereas poor fourth-place 'uff' has three common words and two rare ones. It is, however, my best guess as to why 'zoe' was the most popular choice. Truth be told, with only 70 respondents it's entirely possible that the margin of error here doesn't allow me to say much, given that the top four choices were all relatively popular.

Finally, I couldn't possibly end this little digression without a discussion of why ough is so variable in the first place. Once upon a time, words that we now write using 'gh' in English were written with a funny little character called 'yogh' (ȝ) which sometimes represented a 'y' sound but other times 'g' and yet other times the voiced velar fricative [ɤ] or its voiceless counterpart [x]. Quite a multitasker, that yogh. Throughout the Middle English period, yogh lost many of its functions as the language lost both its velar fricatives, which largely became silent. Yogh gradually ceased to be used, and was replaced by the letter sequence 'gh' by Norman scribes, who weren't familiar with the strictly English letter. Sometimes the new 'gh', no longer useful for representing velar fricatives, went looking for some other fricatives to play with, and found the handy-dandy [f] willing to do double duty as the pronunciation of 'gh' in the 'off' and 'uff' words. And so, by about 1500, English was down one letter (well, actually, down five letters, but we're only concerned with yogh today) and its orthographic complexity had increased considerably.

With many '-ough' words, we are starting to see a great deal of orthographic simplification.
- 'Tho', 'altho' and 'thru' are quite common (and have been for some time);
- 'Borough' is often shortened to 'boro' (though I've never seen the corresponding 'thoro');
- 'Ruff', 'tuff', and 'coff' are at least recognizable from transcriptions of purportedly rustic speech (though I'm not aware of any real register difference in these words);
- 'Plow' is a standard American variant of 'plough';
- While 'dough' is stable (where else would it go? doe? dow? do?), the variant 'donut' is of course highly common.
- 'Hiccup' instead of 'hiccough' seems to be the new standard.

A few 'ough' spellings (bough, especially, which literally has nowhere to go, orthographically speaking) may well persist indefinitely. I wouldn't be surprised, however, to see the trend towards simplification continue and many of these spellings eventually become archaic and then obsolete. Don't quote me on it, zough.

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