How to pronounce crayon

Short answer: say CRAY-ahn (/ˈkreɪɑːn/), two syllables with the stress on the first. Merriam-Webster, American Heritage, Dictionary.com and Oxford's American dictionary list it first and CRAY-uhn (/ˈkreɪən/) second, and Cambridge gives only CRAY-ahn for American English. Merriam-Webster also lists a one-syllable CRAN (/kræn/). For British English, Oxford Learner's Dictionaries and Collins put CRAY-uhn first, and Cambridge gives CRAY-on (/ˈkreɪɒn/). The French original means "pencil" and sounds like kreh-YOHN.

Listen

Is it crayon, cran or crown?

You'll hear all three in the US:

The best numbers come from the Harvard Dialect Survey, an online linguistics project by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder that ended in 2003. Of 11,514 respondents, 48.64% said "cray-ahn", 34.53% "cray-awn" (rhyming with dawn), 14.13% "cran" and 1.46% crown. It wasn't a random sample, and CRAY-uhn wasn't a choice.

Josh Katz, then a statistics PhD student at North Carolina State University, mapped the answers in 2013: "cray-ahn" leads in the Southeast, around the Great Lakes and from Maryland to New York, and "cray-awn" in the West, Kansas, Oklahoma, most of Texas and Maine. On the survey's own dot maps, CRAN answers cluster around the Great Lakes and in the Northeast, and crown answers around Philadelphia and New Jersey. His New York Times dialect quiz asked the same question later that year.

In 2013, Charles Doyle told the American Dialect Society's mailing list that several students in his folklore class said crown, a form missing from standard dictionaries. Crayola's FAQ sides with two syllables: it cites Merriam-Webster's CRAY-ahn and notes that accents vary by person and region.

Our advice: say CRAY-ahn. It's first in four American dictionaries and was the top survey answer. CRAY-uhn and CRAY-awn are fine too. If you grew up saying CRAN, keep it: Merriam-Webster lists it. Crown isn't in Merriam-Webster, Cambridge or Oxford. In Britain, say CRAY-uhn or CRAY-on.

Why is crayon pronounced differently?

English borrowed crayon from French; Merriam-Webster dates the first known use to 1660. In French it means "pencil": craie, "chalk", plus the small-thing suffix -on. Craie comes from Latin creta, "chalk" or "clay", also the root of cretaceous, "chalky".

The trap is two vowels in a row: the long A of day, then an O, with no consonant between them. Some speakers keep both (CRAY-ahn, CRAY-awn), some weaken the second (CRAY-uhn), and some squeeze them into one syllable. Judging by Wiktionary's transcriptions, CRAN can come out close to "crayn", and crown can be an "eh" gliding into "aw", like CRAY-awn in one beat. Where cot and caught sound the same, Wiktionary adds, CRAY-ahn and CRAY-awn are one pronunciation.

How to say crayon step by step

1. Say "cray", as in crayfish: a K, an R and the long A of day. Stress it.
2. Add a lighter "ahn", with the vowel of father, or "awn", as in dawn.
3. Keep two beats. Let the "ay" finish before the "ahn" starts, or the word shrinks to one syllable.

For the British CRAY-on, use the short O of hot. French speakers: English stresses the start, not the end, and a crayon is wax, not a pencil.

Practice in a sentence

• Can you pass me the blue crayon?
• Is it CRAY-ahn or CRAN? Merriam-Webster lists both.
• The kids drew all over the wall in crayon.

Words that share its sounds or roots, with American pronunciations from the Cambridge Dictionary:

The Harvard survey also asked how Americans say aunt, caramel, pecan and route.

What is a crayon?

A crayon is a stick of colored wax, chalk or charcoal for drawing. Crayola says it didn't invent the crayon: the modern crayon began in Europe as charcoal mixed with oil; wax took the place of oil later. Binney & Smith invented Crayola crayons in 1902 and started selling them in 1903. Edwin Binney's wife, Alice, a former schoolteacher, coined the name from French craie, "chalk", and oleaginous, "oily".

Sources

• Merriam-Webster — crayon; American Heritage Dictionary — crayon
• Cambridge Dictionary — crayon, plus rayon, crayfish, mayonnaise and cretaceous; Oxford Learner's Dictionaries — crayon and crayon (American English)
• Dictionary.com — crayon; Collins — crayon; Longman — crayon
• Wiktionary — crayon and cretaceous; French Wiktionary — crayon
• Bert Vaux and Scott Golder — Harvard Dialect Survey, question 9: crayon, 2003 (archived)
• Business Insider — Josh Katz's dialect maps, Walt Hickey, June 2013
• The New York Times — dialect quiz, Josh Katz and Wilson Andrews, December 2013 (archived)
• American Dialect Society mailing list — crayon/crown, Charles C. Doyle, March 2013
• University of Pennsylvania — Language Change in Philadelphia, William Labov
• Crayola — pronunciation FAQ and history FAQ; Wikipedia — Crayola