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Lick or Litch?

How do you pronounce Lich?

  • Litch

    Votes: 154 83.2%
  • Lick

    Votes: 6 3.2%
  • King Komrade

    Votes: 25 13.5%

  • Total voters
    185

G.O.D

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I just saw I asked the exact same a few years back when I clicked the link some posts above. Guess Groundhog day still hasn't passed.
 

Strange Fellow

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The word seems to come from the Old English word "līc" meaning body. Fun fact: This also where the word "like" comes from, literally "having the body of." Anyway, Wikipedia spells it "līċ" (Wikipedia was the only source I could find in five minutes, sue me. They may or may not have taken that spelling from the OED, but that's behind a paywall so I can't check). The dot on top of the c is sometimes used in modern times to indicate the sibilant pronunciation of c in Old English, which is /tʃ/, or "tch" if you will (as opposed to modern English, where the sibilant pronunciation of c is /s/, as in "central").
TLDR: It's Litch. We knew that already.

Fun thread! I see that someone in the old thread made a post excactly like mine, and I could've just quoted that one.
 
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I pronounce it "lit-ch" because, Ich spreche Englisch, nicht Deutsch. If they didn't want it pronounced that way, they should have used the letter k. I still lay all blame on the Normans. They did to the English language what the Ottomans did to the Hagia Sophia.
 

Deleted Member 16721

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And the plural is "litches". Although I am guilty of sometimes pronouncing it as "lick" for some reason. Depends on the mood I'm in I guess.
 

Zombra

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Sometimes I think of it as sounding like "leash" because I've seen "liche" as an alternate spelling.

I'm not sure I've ever had occasion to actually speak the word out loud.
 
Last edited:

Dorateen

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What did the Dreadlord in Secret of the Silver Blades say when asked how to pronounce lich?





Nothing!

Because our party's cleric cast Silence 15' Radius on himself, and then moved next to the Dreadlord, thus preventing the lich from casting any magic.
 
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How do you get Lick or Litch out of it? There's no T in Lich and by default ch doesn't use the hard K sound. So I pronounce it with the li like the start of lips and the ch like the start of cheese.
 

Strange Fellow

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
How do you get Lick or Litch out of it? There's no T in Lich and by default ch doesn't use the hard K sound. So I pronounce it with the li like the start of lips and the ch like the start of cheese.
Phonetically speaking there is a t in both Lich and cheese, which I think is what OP was getting at. I struggle to see another way to pronounce Litch in English than with the "cheese" consonant, whereas Lich can be more ambiguous, and "by default" tends not to be particularly reliable when you're dealing with words as esoteric as this. Plenty of words with a ch in spelling have a hard k sound: Christmas, chameleon, chrome, chimaera, etc.
 

Ismaul

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Werdna's Revenge seems like a French Canuck.

Funny thing is that in French "Liche" is both the english noun Lich and the english verb/noun Lick. It is pronounced "lish", no t sound before the ch.
 

Bastardchops

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I've never heard anyone pronounce it lick. I always thought the pronunciation question was between litch and liche, like a quiche.
 

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