To understand the difference between stressed and unstressed, it may be useful to consider versions of words which differ only in their stress pattern, of which

To understand the difference between stressed and unstressed, it may be useful to consider versions of words which differ only in their stress pattern, of which we have a few. Record, the verb, as in "I'll record the show", is two syllables, unstressed-stressed. Record, the noun, as in "Hey, wanna listen to my new record?" is stressed-unstressed. Ditto address the verb vs. address the noun (at least in American English). In fact, we have a whole family of these words with two versions, mostly french-derived bisyllables, known as initial-stress-derived nouns[0]. Most words of more than one syllable have one primary stress. (Sometimes longer ones have a second, weaker stress, too.) In words of more than one syllable, the stress more often than not falls on the second syllable, though this is far from universal. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial-stress-derived_noun