In my head, “Floo-ther,” too. Rhymes with “Luther.”

Fl uth er.

Flooder.

This page says it rhymes with “brother.” So I went with that from day 1.

I have always pronounced it like it rhymes with “mother”.

*Same here.

^^ Yup. Short “u.”

Short U.

To paraphrase Rod Stewart:

“All I needed was a friend to lend a guiding hand
But you turned into a fluther, and mother, what a fluther, you wore me out”

(It actually says rhymes with “brother” and “mother,” as though the second one somehow clinched it. I guess that was true.)

Fl-other. I take the U is a low vowel sounding U making it sound like the o in other. Like fluttering.

I always call it fluffer, look it up on urban dictionary if you don’t get it.

I pronounce it like “I’d smother the other brother if I had my druther”.

@KNOWITALL I fluff my rice before I make sushi. ;-)

@LuckyGuy Right, same with pancakes! haha! EXACTLY what I was thinking….(not.)

@KNOWITALL how naughty, didn’t know you had hung out in the San Fernando Valley.

I say fluther that rhymes with mother. I never would have thought of floother. I never looked it up.

Why floo? Blunder, plunder, sunder. What word would be an example of a u being pronounced oo that fluther might follow that rule?

Flu, use, usual, utility…

Relax. It’s not meant to be a serious question.

Not uptight, but what comes after a vowel matters when pronouncing words in English. The e in use dictates the sound of the u. Think fuse and fuss. Even still there are exceptions in English and so I could have easily have assumed incorrectly about the pronunciation fluther. I just saw @jca2 wrote Luther, so that makes sense.

Rule, mule, cruel.

More will come to me.

Please don’t pretend to teach me English.

E. E at the end or after the u. That changes the vowel.

Mad made, fad fade, nod node, bit bite, tot tote.

Th to me is like a double consonant, but I don’t even know if that is a rule about th or just something I have in my head. @Jeruba or @janbb might. Flutter, butter, mutter, to me the th affects a vowel the same way, but Luther is a good example where it doesn’t.

We used to spend time with the race car driver Rafael Matos and when he first started driving professionally the announcers called him May-toes. He couldn’t understand why it was so hard for the announcers. In English it makes sense. I told him if he spelled his name Mattos they would get it right. The double consonant changes the vowel in English.

Like I said, I could easily have been wrong about fluther, English is horrible for phonetic assumptions.

@JLeslie: I think you’re reading way too much into it.

I took the q to mean how you pronounce it, even though you may know it’s incorrect.

I know the correct way to pronounce it. I pronounce it the incorrect way in my head, just because.

@jca2 Agreed. I just asked why the oo sound and @Hawaii_Jake gave examples and told me to relax. His examples didn’t make sense. Plus, it’s not nice to tell someone to relax. I wasn’t worked up, I just thought I was missing something with the pronunciation. Me. I wasn’t saying I was right and others were wrong. English is not a strong point for me, so I asked why.

Later I saw your example, because I hadn’t read the thread Initially, and your example made sense.

Then I mention what comes after the vowel changes the pronunciation and he gives three examples of what I just said proving my point.

I don’t think there is a right way for so much of English. Canadians might pronounce different than Americans, Americans often pronounce words like the language they come from, but then other times we anglicize words. It’s a mess.

@JLeslie: Good point. Look at the way British people pronounce “garage.” Totally different than the way we pronounce it here in the US. They rhyme it with “carriage” which, actually, is the way it looks like it should be pronounced.

a-dick-shun

I pronounce it as if it were Gaelic and say “flu-er” (the “th” is silent).

Just kidding. It rhymes with “brother”.

A-dick.

The ‘shun’ is silent though prevalent on the site,

Just found the definitive answer from Our Founders on the Fluther Help site:

“Where did we get the name? A fluther is a group of jellyfish, like a gaggle of geese or a run of salmon. “Fluther” is pronounced /‘flʌ ðɚ/, and rhymes with “brother” and “mother”.”