2910: pain|staking pains|taking Dec 9, 2024

‘Painstaking’ is an unusual word. In many dictionaries, the pronunciation guides will show that people frequently produce the word as /ˈpeɪnˌsteɪkɪŋ/ where the word breaks up effectively as “pain + staking” which, is not the etymology. That pronunciation isn’t so strange—it is what would be anticipated through the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP)—but what is strange is that in Germanic languages, in nominal compounds, the first element acts like an adjective and shouldn’t be modified. Consider the US WWII-era military strategy of island-hopping (hyphenated for clarity) where obviously the islands would be plural, but this isn’t normally grammatical in English. There are exceptions, as of course with ‘painstaking’, though anyway this is more of a quirk with no singular ‘paintaking’ as such, but then this leads to confusing pronunciation.