- 1呃（說話卡住、還在想下一句時的聲音）
Er is not really a word with a meaning. It is the sound many speakers — especially in British English — make while they hunt for the next thing to say: a little hold in the voice when the sentence has not arrived yet. On the page it shows a pause, a search, a bit of uncertainty, not a fact about the world. American writing often puts uh for the same job, and um is a cousin of both. You will see it in dialogue more than in careful essays. People of all ages do it; it is not slang, just speech with the seams showing. Though actually, if you fill every gap with er, listeners may think you are unsure, even when you do know.
er 不是有實際意思的字，而是說話時還沒想好下一句，停下來找詞時發出的聲音，英式英語特別常聽到。在文字上，它表示停頓、搜尋或一點猶豫，多半出現在對話裡，不太出現在正式文章中。美式寫作常用 uh，um 也是近親。不過如果每個停頓都用 er，聽的人可能會以為你不確定，就算你其實很清楚也一樣。
From the word’s history
Mimetic: the sound of hesitation.
模仿說話猶豫時發出的聲音。
組成It does not split. It is a written-down copy of the hesitation sound itself.
原始詞典資料16 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Ername
- 1
A surname.
erintj詞源 1/ɜː/
- 1
informalSaid when hesitating in speech.
- “Er...Feathered Omen, hoot not,” he continued uneasily, “Son of Tanit, hoot not!”
- As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er.
erverb詞源 1/ɜː/
- 1
informalTo utter the word er when hesitating in speech.
- um and er
- He ummed and erred his way through the presentation.
ernoun詞源 1/ɜː/
- 1
An occurrence of the interjection "er".
- Although Shakespeare refers to “hums and ha’s,” sifting through etiquette manuals and public-speaking guides turns up scant evidence of a prohibition against ums, ers and uhs, which are profuse in the first recording of Thomas Edison’s voice, in 1888. Mr. Erard, rather ingeniously, traces the prohibition on um and other speech flaws to the advent of radio in the early 1920s.
ernoun詞源 2/ɜː/
- 1
The name of the Cyrillic script letter Р / р.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
- Elizabeth Regina
- Edward Rex
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Erie
- earned run
- endoplasmic reticulum
- entity-relationship
- emergency room
- estrogen receptor
- Einstein-Rosen bridge
- enhanced radiation
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。