[withinboredom]

In English, there’s only one word in the entire language with a ts sound (pizza) that’s not at the end. They probably could have come up with a name utilizing that fact, making wake words super “easy” to recognize and hard to accidentally say.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Just off the top of my head, depending on accent or dialect: "spritzer", "waltzer", "Mitsubishi", "matzos", "mitzvah".

[eesmith]

A fun code challenge! I started with https://github.com/Alexir/CMUdict/blob/master/cmudict-0.7b as a list of words with pronunciation. It has:

  PIZZA  P IY1 T S AH0

Looks like I can search for " T S " to find the "ts sound that's not at the end"

  % grep " T S " cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
       991

Some of the non-proper nouns include ACCOUNTANCY, ANTSY, and ARTSY. I'll assume this is too close to the end to count, so require two sounds after the " T S ":

  % grep -E " T S [A-Z0-9]+ [A-Z0-9]+" cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
       853

These include: bestseller, blitzkrieg, boatswain, bootstrap, chutzpah, craftsman, draftsmanship, footstep, hotspot, itself, jetstream, outscore, outsell, outside, postscript, shirtsleeve, shortstop, sportsmanship, statesmen, tsar, tsunami, whatsoever, yachtsman, and zeitgeist.

(It doesn't have "spritzer" in the list, and uses the spelling "matzoh" instead of "matzo". I didn't look for a more complete list of word pronunciations.)

Finally, two words with two occurrences of the "ts" sound, neither at the end:

  % grep -E " T S .*T S " cmudict-0.7b
  ITSY-BITSY  IH2 T S IY0 B IH1 T S IY0
  TSETSE  T S IY1 T S IY0

[sph]

"boatswain" should be pronounced "bosun".

[eesmith]

You're right. Though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain says "formerly and dialectally also /ˈboʊtsweɪn/ BOHT-swayn", the dictionaries I checked do not list that alternative.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/boatswain even comments:

> Phonetic spelling bo'sun/bosun is attested from 1840. Fowler [1926] writes, "The nautical pronunciation (bō'sn) has become so general that to avoid it is more affected than to use it."

[withinboredom]

Most of the examples you gave are compound words, or made through suffixes and who knows, maybe my Russian teacher told a lie!

[eesmith]

It certainly seems your Russian teacher wasn't fond of schnitzel nor seltzer.

[withinboredom]

I was literally laughing so hard from this comment. Thanks for brightening my day.

[YurgenJurgensen]

"Zeitgeist" seems like a bug, I've never heard anyone pronounce the leading 'z' as 'ˈts' in English, and doing so as a non-German might even be seen as 'over-pronuciation'.

[eesmith]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeitgeist#Pronunciation gives two pronunciations:

Pronunciation (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈtsaɪtˌɡaɪst/, /ˈzaɪtˌɡaɪst/

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeitgeist also gives two: ˈtsīt-ˌgīst ˈzīt-

I tried to get statistics from listening to https://youglish.com/pronounce/zeitgeist/english? but found I have a hard time distinguishing the two forms.

[denton-scratch]

Seems implausible.

~ Fatso

~ Pitstop

~ Katsup

~ Yachtsman

~ Scotsmen

~ Batsman

There don't seem to be many, admittedly.

[xnorswap]

That fact seems dubious, does tzatziki not count?

[eCa]

Is tzatziki the only word that both starts and contains, but doesn’t end, with ts sound?

[eesmith]

tsetse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsetse_fly

[denton-scratch]

Tzatziki, Tsetse and Tzar are not English words; OP said there was just one English word (which he identified as "pizza", which isn't an English word).

[xnorswap]

It has foreign roots but it's surely an English word by any workable definition.

[eesmith]

And "tsetse" has been used in English for nearly 100 years longer than pizza - the latter only really introduced because of Allied soldiers sent to in Italy.

Google Ngram says it wasn't until the 1970s when "pizza" was more commonly used than "tsetse." https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tsetse%2Cpizza... . Or from BoingBoing today, "North Americans feared and misunderstood pizza in the 1950s" - https://boingboing.net/2022/11/21/north-americans-feared-and... .

[ConceptJunkie]

That is trivially not true.