Jeopardy! fans scratching their heads over pronunciation of a common color

There have been various Jeopardy! answer disputes over the years, but this one might be the most colorful of them all.

A Reddit user shared a Jeopardy! question from the game fans can play on their Amazon Alexa devices. Anyone who owns an Alexa device can ask the device to open Jeopardy! and then will be given clues to answer phrased in the typical way of the game show - "What is..." or "Who is..."

The title of their post asked: "Alexa Jeopardy 9/11; how do you pronounce mauve?" The category of the clue was: "A few colorful words."

• Jeopardy! fan favorite Sam Buttery opens up about his 'life changing journey' after competing on the show
• Jeopardy! fans 'obsessed' with player’s buzzer style as he looks like he's 'about to deliver uppercut’

"This word for a medium purple can be pronounced close to 'suave' or in a way that rhymes with 'cove,'" the clue read, leaving the Reddit user confused, "Does anyone pronounce mauve in a way that rhymes with cove????"

They added: "My immediate thought was 'mauve.' But then I hesitated because of the 'cove' reference. But I went ahead with mauve as my answer and got it right but then Alexa said I was correct and pronounced it as mohve (rhyming with cove). And now I'm all sorts of confused."

Other fans of the long-running game show wrote in the comments their interpretation of the color. One person got technical, writing: "SUAVE is one syllable. A lot of the time when U is followed by another vowel, it becomes more of a /w/ sound, rather than /u/. They’re two distinct, but closely related sounds. So the same way SWEET rhymes with MEET, SUAVE can rhyme with MAUVE."

"Mauve is from the French so the 'au' is more like a long o in English so I pronounce mauve to rhyme with cove," a second added.

Another admitted that they rarely said the word: "I’ve heard both, but 'Mawv' is definitely what I have heard the most. I’d say i pronounce it 'Mawv' but I can’t think of a time I’ve ever had to say the word out loud."

But it appears that the pronunciation depends on where you live. "I set my VPN to the UK and it pronounced it rhyming like cove," one wrote.

"Set it to Canada and it rhymed with suave. Set it to Australia and it rhymed with cove," they continued, "Set it to South Korea and it rhymed with suave. Set it to Portugal and it rhymed with cove."

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