Yesterday I asked:

‘Exit’, first syllable: someone you used to date,or what chickens make?

— brett royal (@brettroyal) May 13, 2013

The responses I got were split 50-50, if you ignore the handful of people that have bizarre pronunciations that don’t fall nicely into either category. Since I had a pretty small number of people responding, most of whom were linguists and thus, you know, kinda weird, I figured I’d look a little wider. Checking Forvo.com, I found, again, an even split. Still, asking linguists and whatever folks actually choose to submit their pronunciations to an awesome website is still pretty weird.

SO I checked for occurrences in natural speech, looking at all the corpora here. Unfortunately ‘exit’ isn’t super common, so I was only able to find a handful of tokens. Anyhow, I continued to find a 50-50 split, more or less. Maybe younger sounding people are a bit more likely to be voiceless? I checked the speech synthezisers at dictionary.com and m-w.com. Both of them list both voiced and voiceless variants, but only the former actually synthesized both types. PRETTY COOL.

Anyhow, at this point I’ve spent about two hours JUST TODAY, not to mention nearly 15 minutes last night worrying about this, and it’s summer time, so, you know, come on. So, in summary, here are a bunch of people saying the word ‘exit.’