Dictate (pronunciation)

• The verb 'to dictate', in either of its principal meanings, nowadays has the stress on its second syllable: 'dick-TATE' (IPA: /ˌdɪk ˈteɪt/). The meanings are

to say aloud words that someone else is to write down. Bosses may dictate a letter for a secretary to put on paper; teachers sometimes dictate exercises to students,

After this came the meaning 'to lay down a rule, or order', as the winners of a war may dictate the terms of the surrender of the losers, or as George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch (ix), "A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards."

Do not use 'to dictate' to mean 'to be a dictator' in the political sense ('an autocrat'): it is not acceptable to say "Hitler dictated over Germany", or "Caesar dictated Rome".

• The noun, meaning roughly 'a command', has the stress on the first sylable, 'DICK-tate', (IPA: /ˈdɪk teɪt/). It is most often found in the plural, dictates, tightly, as in "the dictates of the Occupying Power", or more figuratively as in "the dictates of fashion".

Note

This pattern of shifting stress in words that look identical but belong to two separate word classes is quite common in English.

Quirk (1985) (Appendix I.56 B) describes the most common: "When verbs of two syllables are converted into nouns, the stress is sometimes shifted from the second to the first syllable. The first syllable, typically a Latin prefix, often has a reduced vowel /ə/ in the verb but a full vowel in the noun: He was con-VICT-ed (IPA: /kən ˈvɪkt ɪd/) of theft, and so became a CON vict (IPA: /ˈkɒn vɪkt/)" [AWE's rendition of IPA].

There follows a list of some 57 "words having end-stress as verbs but initial stress as nouns in Br[itish] E[nglish]." Note that "in Am[erican] E[nglish], many have initial stress as verbs also". Quirk's list is the foundation of AWE's category:shift of stress. Additions have been made from, amongst others, Fowler, 1926-1996.