Is There A Right Way To Pronounce Worcestershire Sauce?

Whether you're marinating a steak, adding depth of flavor to a beef stew, or lending a little funk to your onion dip, a bottle of anchovy-laden Worcestershire sauce is a handy ingredient for any home cook. It may not be the first versatile fermented fish sauce in the world — not by a long shot. But it's occupied its own niche ever since it was invented in 1837 by a pair of English chemists (or pharmacists, as we in the States call them) named John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins. 

There's some murkiness around the sauce's origin, with claims of it being a nobleman's discovery in India, or coming about by accident after an unpalatable brew was left to ferment for a year. But perhaps the biggest mystery of all is how to pronounce the darn thing.

There are dozens of possible pronunciations a first-time reader might use for the sauce, and somehow all of them feel wrong. "Wor-KES-ter-sheer" makes you sound like an American tourist loudly asking for fries at a British chip shop. "Wor-SES-ter-sheer" is hardly any better. Others use a sort of clumsy imitation of a British accent — "wurst-uh-shyre," or "woost-ih-shur" — that makes them sound like Winston Churchill with a mouthful of mashed potatoes. The correct pronunciation feels almost as fake: "wuh-stuh-shur." Why is it pronounced like that? Old English, that's why.

Lea and Perrins, who invented and lent their names to the most famous brand of the sauce, were based in Worcester, an English cathedral city where Oliver Cromwell dealt a decisive defeat to the royal forces of King Charles II in the English Civil War. The -cester suffix comes from the Roman "castrum" or "camp," referring to its past as a Roman encampment. It was, and remains, the most prominent city in the county of Worcestershire, so-called because English counties were mostly named by taking the most dominant city and adding a "-shire" at the end. Lea and Perrins could have named it "Worcester sauce" and saved us all a lot of trouble, but they decided to name it after the county instead. Interestingly, though, many Brits actually do simply pronounce the sauce "Worcester" — or "wuh-stuh" — which only adds to the confusion about how to say it.

As for why "Worcestershire" itself is pronounced that way, part of it is due to something called "haplology" – the inclination to eliminate a syllable while pronouncing a word. Incidentally, the name "England," originally "Anglaland," is also a result of haplology. Hence, "Worcester" ends up sounding like "wuh-stuh" — and "shire" becomes more of a "shur" when it's a suffix. However you pronounce it, though, there's one thing we can all agree on: Sweet-yet-savory Worcestershire sauce is a welcome addition to your bloody mary.