Hi Joe,

Just came across this page. Lisa, English native speaker and teacher/coach. Personally, I’ve never come across a case where “danced, placed or kissed” were pronounced with a “d” ending… I can’t even do it… and I tried :-D. Those three words only have an “s” ending so it’s “t”, to my knowledge.

Now “used” is another thing and an interesting case which I’ve highlighted on many an occasion with my students!
It depends on which “used” you’re using! In most (if not all) pronunciations of the words I’ve heard, this is how it goes:
1. There’s the verb “to use” where I believe most people including myself would pronounce the “s” with a “z” sound (like this: “youze”), and your “ed” ending would be like any other “z” verb-end sound, i.e. “d”.
So: “I used my hairdryer this morning’ would be pronounced “I youzed my…”
2. And then there’s “used” as in “I used to love eating meat but not so much nowadays.”, where the “s” would typically (again, according to myself and most Anglo natives I hear) be pronounced as an “s” sound. Thus, your “ed”—following that rule for “s” verb-end sounds”— will be the “t” sound. Like “danced, placed or kissed”
So: “I used to love eating meat but not so much nowadays.” would be pronounced “I youst to love…”
Of course, having two “t” consecutively, will boil down to having just one. If they’re linked, as they usually are…

N.B. For this last usage: I have heard on the rare occasion, people pronouncing this second case “used” with a “z” sound. But you still hear a “t” sound following the word, right? You could very well have heard this before. So which is is? “d” as it should be or “t” as I’m hearing it?

I think what’s happening here, is that even if these people do that and the “d” sound should normally apply in that case, there’s always the preposition “to” that follows the word “used” (the verb is, after all, “to used TO” or even, “to be used TO”, “to get used TO”—always ending in a “TO”, in all cases…) which brings out a “t” sound. So, that “t” sound—even after an “z” pronunciation—would remain dominant to the ear. Do you see where that might be possible? “I youzed to…”. Even if “used” is pronounced with a “d” sound as in this case, the “t” sound of the word “TO” would be prevalent, as we would naturally swallow the “d” sound a little bit to be able to link to the “t” sound coming up.

I know this is detailed and may even become a tad confusing in the end :-D, but hope it helps! and I do hope there aren’t any mistakes in spelling and grammar as I only gave it a cursory once-over due to lack of time.

Hi Joe, sorry for the slow response I didn’t get a notification for this. I’m not too familiar with that as a rule but yes, I think you’ll have an issue there that it will depend on who you ask, different people might pronounce them differently so I don’t think it can fairly be said that it’s always the same. Personally, I think it does come out sounding like a t more often than not, but it’s quite a subtle difference.

Yet I have found that it’s all over the place depending on who you ask.
• used ➜ /d/ or /t/ ?
• danced ➜ /d/ or /t/ ?
• placed ➜ /d/ or /t/ ?
• kissed ➜ /d/ or /t/ ?

Sorry for the slow response; it would mostly denote the past tense, so something done or resultant from the past. Do you have any specific examples that aren’t formed like past verbs?

Thanks. If memory serves I think I went with the most common exceptions here but beyond these ones the verbs are probably less useful; though yes there would certainly be more to be said about the exceptions and why we use them.

I like it. It would make a good extended lesson to understand what otehr exceptions there might be for ED sounded endings…ESL teacher

Hi Howard, yes I’m sure you’d find different pronunciations depending on regions though I couldn’t say exactly the patterns myself, as I’m afraid pronunciation is not really a specialism of mine. You’re right though, the schwa is very close to the short u, and depending on how someone enunciates it might sound like /id/ or /ud/.