Consonants /d/ versus /ʒ/, 9 pairs
[ruderouge.html]

The spelling of /d/ is <d> or <dd>. The /ʒ/ sound is spelled <ge> or <zu>.

The contrast is between a stop and a fricative, both voiced and fairly close in the mouth. It might be a slight problem for speakers of languages which do not have the /ʒ/ sound, such as German and Arabic.

The consonant /d/ can occur in any position in the syllable, but /ʒ/ only occurs finally or intervocalically, other than in foreign names or loan words such as gendarme. /ʒ/ is in any case a very rare phoneme, found in only 334 words in the source dictionary.


adder azure
  adders azures
bayed beige
brewed Bruges 
brood Bruges
cedar seizure
  cedars seizures
rood rouge
rude rouge

John Higgins, Shaftesbury, January 2010
updated Chiang Mai, 2025