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I'm not a native speaker of English and I'm always interested in issues of pronunciation. The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, compiled by phonetician J. C. Wells, has only one possible pronunciation for versus or vs, vs., namely /'vɜ:s əs/ and /'vɝs əs/ for British and American English respectively. Yet, repeatedly, I've come across a way to pronounce it on Youtube that I would transcribe as /vɜ:s/ or /vɝs/.

Is this widespread, faulty, frowned upon? Do people simply fail to associate the abbreviated form with the full form?

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    Yes, I think it’s like pronouncing “e.g.” as “egg”.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Sep 9, 2019 at 13:43
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    @Lawrence Seriously !?! /eg/ for e.g. I've never heard.
    – grandtout
    Commented Sep 9, 2019 at 13:49
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    In rapid speech, I can easily imagine the schwa in unaccented /səs/ being elided, yielding BrE [vɜːsː] or AmE [vɚsː]. I don’t think it’s necessarily faulty, just normal laziness (which is everywhere in natural speech).
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Sep 9, 2019 at 13:50
  • The only difference between BrE and AnE is the pronunciation of the ver syllable just like in any word with ver (verb, versatile, version, etc.). And in legal texts, it's v. and scientific texts, vs.
    – Lambie
    Commented Sep 9, 2019 at 13:54
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    @petitrien What I meant was that "vs" should be pronounced the same way as "versus", not "verse". So those that pronounce "vs" as "verse" aren't reading "vs" as an abbreviation but as a no-vowel word in its own right.
    – Lawrence
    Commented Sep 9, 2019 at 13:57

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No, it's not standard or common for people to say "verse" instead of "versus." If someone on a YouTube channel said "verse" in place of "versus," it was either an oral gaffe or the result of their own ignorance—a malaprop.

That said, there are people who do mistakenly think "versus" is a verb, specifically a non-existent definition of the verb "verse" that would convey a subject and object fighting one another, thus writing things like "John verses Susan" instead of "John versus Susan." This of course is undetectable in speech because "verses" and "versus" are pronounced the same, the very reason for this malapropistic back formation happening in the first place. Since that's what it is, a malapropistic back formation of "versus," it is conceivable that someone might conjugate that non-existent verb as "verse," sans any final S, if the subject is plural, like "John and Mary verse Joe and Molly." Again, I haven't heard anyone actually do that, but it's conceivable.

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  • Are they saying /vəːs/ or /vz/?
    – marcellothearcane
    Commented Sep 9, 2019 at 20:24
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As mentioned in a previous question, verse is used by some speakers as a verb meaning something like "go up against". This is non-standard. I don't use it this way, so I'm not very familiar with the usage, but if it is a normal verb, I'd expect to hear "verse" after a plural noun but "verses" after a singular noun (as Benjamin Harman suggests).

The standard usage of versus is as a preposition, similar to against. Latin words ending in -us are usually pronounced with voiceless /s/ (as in your transcriptions, /'vɜ:s əs/ and /'vɝs əs/), but for some reason, I believe many American English speakers pronounce versus with a voiced /z/ at the end, /'vɝsəz/, even speakers who don't use verse as a verb. (I don't know whether that pronunciation occurs in British English.)

While Janus Bahs Jacquet has a point about vowel sounds sometimes being elided in fast speech, I certainly would recommend avoiding the use of any pronunciation that sounds like /vɜ:s/ or /vɝs/ because of the possibility of it being heard as the non-standard variant form verse.

Also related: Is 'verse' (or a homonym of 'verse') another word for 'versus'?

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