>The subject today is Stress on syllables and the differences each side of the pond
>

>WORD        US           UK (and the civilised world)
>__________  ___________  ____________________________
>Metalurgy   Metal-URGY   Me-TAL-(uh)gy
>Laborotory  LAB-'ro-TORY Lab-OR-at'ry

I'm hearing both LAB-ra-tory and luh-BOR-a-tory here. Despite the very relaxed handling of vowels here, haven't heard of laborOtory yet.

Funny though, the title of this thread seemed like "oh dang when is this Friday going to end... I'm so stressed". The word we use in Serbian is "naglasak" - meaning literally on-voice-bit, i.e. where you add more voice. We also used the word accent (probably from French or German influenced), but I've noticed that nobody's using it here. At least not in any grammar - accent is a decorative detail, like a candle or a fancy light fixture. For speech accentuation I've heard "emphasis", but that rather applies to the part of the sentence highlighted by intonation, not to syllables. I've also seen accent to mean a diacritical symbol.

So is "stress" really THE word for the special pronunciation of the accented syllable?