other American dialects and end up with anyway. For instance, some speakers from the Northeast pronounce Florida, orange, and horrible with but foreign and origin with . The list of words affected differs from dialect to dialect and occasionally from speaker to speaker, which is an example of sound change by lexical diffusion. Mergers before historic postvocalic R /aʊr/–/aʊər/ merger The Middle English merger of the vowels with the spellings and affects all modern varieties of English and causes words like sour and hour, which originally had one syllable, to have two syllables and so to rhyme with power. In accents that lack the merger, sour has one syllable, and power has two syllables. Similar mergers also occur in which hire gains a syllable and so makes it pronounced like higher, and coir gains a syllable and so makes it pronounced like coyer. Card–cord merger The card–cord merger, or cord–card merger, is a merger of Early Modern English with , which results in the homophony of pairs like card/cord, barn/born and far/for. It is roughly similar to the father–bother merger but before r. The merger is found in some Caribbean English accents, in some West Country accents in England, and in some accents of Southern American English. Areas of the United States in which the merger is most common include Central Texas, Utah, and St. Louis, but it is not dominant even there and is rapidly disappearing. In the United States, dialects with the card–cord merger are some of the only ones without the horse–hoarse merger, and there is a well-documented correlation between them. merger In Modern English, the reflexes of Early Modern English and are highly susceptible to phonemic mergers with other vowels. Words belonging to that class are most commonly spelled with oor, our, ure, or eur. Examples include poor, tour, cure, Europe (words such as moor ultimately from Old English ō words). Wells refers to the class as the words after the keyword of the lexical set to which he assigns them. In traditional Received Pronunciation and General American, words are pronounced with Received Pronunciation ( before a vowel) and General American . However, those pronunciations are being replaced by other pronunciations in many accents. In Southern England, words are often pronounced with and so moor is often pronounced , tour , and poor . The traditional form is much more common in Northern England. A similar