Aunt/Auntie, Ant/Anty, Aint/Ainty...How do you address your Mother/Father's Sister?

I don’t communicate much with my aunt or my uncle, but I call them by their first name.

Aunt Bitchy.

Being from the south, I pronounce aunt and ant the same way. Now that I’m grown, I usually just use their first name though.

Tyotia :) It’s the Russian word for “aunt”.

They are all ants.

As I said in an earlier post, the Chinese language distinguishes between :

your mother’s elder sister;
your mother’s younger sister;
your mother’s elder brother’s wife;
your mother’s younger brother’s wife;
your father’s elder sister;
your father’s younger sister;
your father’s elder brother’s wife;
your father’s younger brother’s wife;

…!

So given these categories, there’s much less chance for an overlap. However, if there really is an overlap, then you generally add the name before the corresponding ‘aunt’. So it would be something like, ‘Teresa-aunt’

Ant

My cousins call my mom “awwnt” and it sounds weird to me.

I am from the American midwest

Aunt Shirley, Aunt Anna Mae, Aunt Anne, Aunt Mary Ann.

@filmfann I have an Aunt Marianne too!

By her first name.

Said like “ant.” The “awnt” pronunciation always sounded pretentious to me. Don’t know why though…
@Vunessuh – I, too, have an Aunt Mary Ann! She’s the last living person I know who looks so much like my mom that I do a double take when I see her.

I usually say Ant.

Aunt Judy and Auntie B

I only have two ants. Ant MaryJo and Ant Donna. They are the best.

Aunt, isn’t that the right way to say it?

I call my Mother’s sister Aunt Dot (pronounced Ant Dot). She looks, acts and sounds so much like my Mom that I’ve called her “Mom” a couple of times too. HA!

we’re pretty casual in my family so I addressed my aunts by their first name: i.e. Carole, without the title “Aunt.” I had a great-Aunt who was very old fashioned and if I called her “Helen” she would correct me and say “Aunt Helen.” So then I would have to say “Aunt Helen.”

@lucillelucillelucille to her face..do you?
@KatetheGreat I like that…Tyotia Angela..nice ring:)
@lifeflame…interesting
@filmfann yeah! mine is Aunt Mary Kate
@Blackberry yes! awwnt or ant
@jca in our family it’s called respecting your elders..tehehe

Aunt _________ (pronouned ant). My son calls my husband’s sisters Auntie ______ (per their request).

For my dad’s side, I’ve always said aunt, then when I figured out that people said “ant” I though that was weird because it’s homophonic (and homographic) to ant, the creeping insect. I never say auntie either.
For the other side, I use zio/zia because it is italian for “aunt”. even though I only have one true aunt that I call by first name on that side, I call my mom’s aunts aunts (my great-aunts).

She was so mean I called her Anti Christ!

Aunt (pronounced ant) ______.

Aunt. Pronounced Ant. Same thing I call my brother, Anthony.

@deni My son is named Anthony and I find myself calling him Ant as well.

I migrated from the ‘ant’ pronunciation to ‘aunt’ when a much older sister corrected me. Now, I don’t think it matters, at least to many aunts in the US. My SO calls his ‘Auntie’.

Aunt _____ pronounced “Ant”

@JustJessica I love it as a nickname for Anthony! Recently, I said to my FRIEND Anthony….“so does anyone ever call you Ant?” He couldn’t get over it…he thought it was so weird. I thought maybe it was just us that called an Anthony Ant….I thought it was common!

Depends on the person, some I would use their first name now and others (if they were still here) I would call Aunt (pronounced Ant). Some of my Aunts were really cool and wild ladies. Wish I could spend more time with them now I am an adult.

We call them “Zia _____”

By name. One set of grandparents as well. By their choice. In later years we all called our mother Harriet at times. She had some affectionate nicknames too. My brother, with whom she lived in the last years occasionally called her Harrat or The Rat just as dad had done.

@Tuesdays_Child: My wife’s family uses “Zia” too.

I assume your family is Italian.

Auntie Climax, she’s such a let down ;¬}

@cprevite you guessed it…. :~)

Why is it pronounced ‘Ant’? The word ant is already pronounced ‘ant’.......

Auntie Gisele, pronounced “antie”, and Aunt Nina, pronounced “ant”. I’ve never known anyone who uses the “awnt” pronunciation. I’ve always thought it was an American thing, though I could be wrong.

I also have an Auntie Barb, but since my grandmother died and she got all wacko and evil, she’s the Barbarian.

@Blackberry the word aunt is pronounced differently by people. Some prefer to say awwnt and some prefer to pronounce it as ant. However, the spelling would be a u n t whether you pronounce it awwnt or ant.

Aunt, pronounced “Awnt” I think.
Never referred to my Aunt as “Ant”. It’s not how it’s spe

I call all my Aunt’s by their first name when speaking to them directly. But when I’m talking about one of them I will say Ant Jo etc. I think when I was a kid I called them Ant Whoever. My nieces and nephew call me Auntie Beth, but it sounds more like Onnie.

Nowadays I just call them Julie and Viv because those aretheir names! but when I was younger I would call them Auntie Julie and Auntie Viv.

“Ant” was simply considered incorrect and ignorant. If any of my family used a title it would have been aunt [awnt]. I’m from New England.

And they’re all dead now except for my mother’s sister Betty. She and my mother stopped talking in the late 70s and she did not make an effort when she knew my mother [her sister] was dying. This is something I still cannot believe.

@AmWiser So that means I can pronounce the word ant ‘awnt’ lol? Or the word supposedly ‘supposably’?

@Blackberry if my opinion counts, you may, can, and should.

@Blackberry I was going to say you’re jest tryin to be funny, but according to Wikionary yes you can say supposedly or supposably. Go figure!

@anartist How awful that must have been for you….Such a sad family story. I’m sorry to hear that.

@AmWiser In spite of all that, I think will attend Betty’s funeral if I am notified of it. When I was young she was my favorite aunt. They were both, sadly, being stubborn New Englanders.

@AmWiser Doh! .

I’ve always thought “huh” when someone refers to “aunt” as “ant,” but I’ve noticed a lot of people use “ant.” Since it’s spelled a-u-n-t, I choose to use it sounding like “aunt.”

Aunt is the correct word to use.
Ant is a small insect.
Ain’t is something that is not so.