But that's the correct pronunciation.

[struggle]Must not derail perfectly good thread with traditional anti-LOTR rant ...[/struggle]

Even if it's not for everybody, LOTR repays the mature reader, for here there are indeed "icy beauties which pierce the soul" as one reviewer (P.S. Beagle?) had it. My one regret over having finished LOTR at fifteen was that I had not waited until twenty-one. (So I do the best I can, reading it, getting older, rereading it, getting older still...)

Tolkien actually didn't coin very many words; he resurrected words long buried, buried with Old English. All his Dwarves had names -- of Norse elves yet -- lifted from old literature like the Eddas or Norse mythological tales. Even his wizard was so: Gandalf means magic-elf, and this was the name of a Norse dwarf. Even mathom, I think, is a lift from Old English. Thain is just a variant spelling of a word familiar to Shakespeareans -- from the Scottish play.

One of the two. Enroute to checking on that, I found that a venereal disease of horses is pronounced doo-reen, not dow-reen. And that the word is perhaps derived from the Arabic.

Our 9yo daughter reads 24/7. Her vocabulary is amazing. Her pronunciation is hysterical. We try not to laugh out loud as we work out which word she is using (not too hard as she has an amazing grasp of meaning and context, but canbe a challenge when you're getting to 4-syllable words and words of foreign origin). We could make a gameshow out of it, methinks.