If you’re sick of hearing the viral audio clip of the word “laurel” (which has been making the rounds because many people bizarrely hear “yanny” instead), then it may be time to try some other sounds.
The clip, which spread via social media, was originally recorded almost a decade ago by an actor-singer named Jay Aubrey Jones, who was working on a project for Vocabulary.com at the time. The word-learning site hired trained vocalists to utter words for pronunciation recordings that are still in use on the site. And while Jones might have become meme-famous for his baritone intonation of “laurel,” he recorded some 36,000 other words as well.
Click on the speaker icon beside each word above to hear Jones’ rendition. Click on the word itself to see definitions and context via Vocabulary.com.
While memes like this can seem like superficial distractions, they are also moments of learning, says Marc Tinkler, chief technology officer for Vocabulary.com. He provided TIME with this selection of other words uttered by Jones’ dulcet voice, with the hopes that the Great Laurel-or-Yanny Debate of 2018 will at least leave us with more robust lexicons.
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