Jeopardy! fans debate mispronunciation of answer and why it was accepted

Jeopardy! fans are at it again debating what should be accepted on the show and what shouldn't.

On Monday, July 1, viewers at home saw Matt Brooks from Fredericksburg, Virginia and Zoe Strassfield from Water Mill, New York, face the returning champion Cat Pisacano from New York, New York. Matt was leading $6,200 to Cat $4,600 during the Jeopardy! round, while Zoe was down $1,000. Matt asked for the $400 clue in "Taking You to School," which read: " Anatomy : This hollow, tubular structure, also called the voice box, contains both true and false vocal cords."

Matt pronounced the work "larnyx" incorrectly when answering. Host Ken Jennings heard the mispronunciation but still accepted the answer. This caused a major debate among viewers on a Reddit thread.

Click here to follow the Mirror US on Google News to stay up to date with all the latest news, sport and entertainment stories.

READ MORE: Jeopardy! producer reveals one thing Drew Basile needs 'to work on' before Tournament of Champions

READ MORE: Jeopardy! star Erin Buker says her second lowest score is 'teachable moment' for her kids

One person under the thread wrote: "How in the world did they accept 'larnyx' as a correct response for 'larynx'? They say pronunciation doesn’t count, but they routinely count answers wrong when the spelling and pronunciation don’t go together - 'larnyx' is just not a conceivable way to pronounce 'larynx'. We were expecting them to come back and correct the score on that and they didn't. It really soured the whole game for me." A person replied to that comment, writing: "The pronunciation was accepted by Alex (judges) back on 3/27/2006," with a link from the J Archive .

The J Archive showed that the answer was accepted back 2006 and back in November 14, 1997. The late host Alex Trebek described it as "a common pronunciation." Additionally, before Final Jeopardy!, player Sahir Islam's score was changed and it was confirmed that "'larynex' was an appropriate pronunciation for 'larynx.'"

Another person on the thread wrote: "I’m definitely interested in others’ perspectives on this, but in American parlance I feel like it’s extremely common to hear larynx pronounced like 'larnyx' - I have to imagine that if a mispronunciation is common enough colloquially they might feel compelled to accept it. So for that reason I didn’t feel super strongly about this ruling either way." A third person write: "I feel like 'larinex' is a reasonable way to pronounce "larynx" phonetically though, it's just pronouncing the Y a bit differently and 'nx' is 'nex.'"