elision

In phonetics and phonology, the omission of a sound (a phoneme) in speech. Elision is common in casual conversation.

More specifically, elision may refer to the omission of an unstressed vowel, consonant, or syllable. This omission is often indicated in print by an apostrophe. Verb: elide.

See also:

• Assimilation
• Clipping
• Connected Speech
• Dissimilation
• Ellipsis
• Metaplasm
• Principle of Least Effort
• Pronunciation
• Slurvian
• Syncope
• "Wanna" Construction

Etymology:

Examples and Observations:

• "View'd freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time."
  (Walt Whitman, "Slang in America," 1885)



• "Elision of sounds can . . . be seen clearly in contracted forms like isn't (is not), I'll (I shall/will), who's (who is/has), they'd (they had, they should, or they would), haven't (have not) and so on. We see from these examples that vowels or/and consonants can be elided. In the case of contractions or words like library (pronounced in rapid speech as /laibri/), the whole syllable is elided."
  (Tej R Kansakar, A Course in English Phonetics. Orient Blackswan, 1998)



• "An elision is the omission of a sound for phonological reasons . . .: 'cause (also spelled 'cos, cos, coz) from because; fo'c'sle from forecastle; or ice tea from iced tea (in which -ed is pronounced /t/ but omitted because of the immediately following /t/)."
  (John Algeo, "Vocabulary," in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume IV, ed. by Suzanne Romaine. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999)



• "In North and South, Mr. [John] Jakes is careful to keep his elisions within quotation marks: 'I'm sure, Cap'n,' says a farmer in his novel, and a stevedore calls a young soldier a 'sojer boy.' . . .
  
  "Stephen Crane, in his Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, in 1896 pioneered wanna in literature with 'I didn' wanna give 'im no stuff.' The spelling is designed to recreate the way the spoken word pounds, shapes and knocks about the original words."
  (William Safire, "The Elision Fields." The New York Times Magazine, August 13, 1989)