Minimal Pair List Consonant /ʒ/ versus vowels, 5 pairs

The /ʒ/ sound occurs initially in a handful of loan words from French such as gendarme , medially in derivatives such as collision , in a few words ending in -ure such as leisure and treasure , and finally in a few words of French origin such as luge and rouge . It is the rarest of RP phonemes, occurring in only 334 words in the Mitton dictionary.

Since it does not enter any consonant clusters, there are hardly any instances of its making a minimal pair with a vowel. However there is one case of /ʒ/ versus /ɪ/

luge Louis

and one of /ʒ/ versus /eɪ/

rouge roué

There are also several cases where changing /ʒ/ to /ɪ/ yields a new word with /eɪ/. Whether these could be called minimal pairs is doubtful.

leisure layer
  leisured layered
pleasure player

.