longer (meaning width or the transitive verb with a river or divide) and , the past tense of 'spin' (). Other minimal pairs found in Australian English include 'Manning' (the surname) and 'manning' (the present participle and gerund of the verb 'to man') as well as 'planet' versus 'plan it' . Apart from Jones's, dictionaries rarely show a difference between these varieties of . Experimental recordings of RP-speaking Cambridge University undergraduates has indicated that after coarticulatory effects are taken into account, words such as bag, that, gab, Ann, ban, damp, mad, bad, and sad may have slightly longer vowels than relatively shorter words such as lad, snag, pad, Pam, and plan. However, no evidence of consistent duration differentiation was found in the possible minimal pairs adder/adder, cad/CAD, can (noun)/can (verb), dam/damn, jam/jam, lam/lamb, manning/Manning, mass/mass, sad/SAD. This casts doubt on its status as a true phonemic split among RP-speakers, and has been described instead as diachronically stable, lexically specific sub-phonemic variation. raising In the sociolinguistics of English, raising is a process that occurs in many accents of American English, and to some degree in Canadian English, by which , the "short a" vowel found in such words as ash, bath, man, lamp, pal, rag, sack, trap, etc., is tensed: pronounced as more raised, and lengthened and/or diphthongized in various environments. The realization of this "tense" (as opposed to "lax") varies from to to to , depending on the speaker's regional accent. The most commonly tensed variant of throughout North American English is when it appears before nasal consonants (thus, for example, in fan as opposed to fat). In foreign borrowings Many foreign borrowed words such as taco, llama, drama, piranha, Bahamas, pasta, Bach, pecan, pajamas etc. vary as to whether or not they have the vowel or the vowel in various dialects in English. In Canada and Northern England, many speakers pronounce such words with the same vowel as , whereas in American, Australian and New Zealand English as well as RP, they usually have the same vowel as (although taco and pasta have the vowel in RP). However the pronunciation of certain words can vary even in regions which either usually assign the vowel or usually assign the vowel to such words; pajamas and pecan, for instance, vary among Americans as to whether or not they have . Other pronunciations Other pronunciations of the letter in English have come