@Jasper I don't think there's another word beginning with wh that's pronounced with an /f/.
(At the beginning.)
I looked it up in a dictionary (CMUdict) but nothing came up. However, they provide four different pronunciations for phew and whew (three of them are for whew), namely PHEW F Y UW1, WHEW W UW1, WHEW(1) HH W UW1, WHEW(2) HH Y UW1 (refer to this chart for words where sounds described by these symbols occur).
But, of course, we're talking CMUdict, which isn't a very comprehensive dictionary, in my opinion, and the transcription system is more akin to the one found in American dictionaries, and I think a bunch of students compiled it, so this isn't a definitive answer.
There also isn't a word containing the wh sequence where the /f/ phoneme is part of its pronunciation. For the sake of comprehensiveness I also went through all the words with wh and /h/ (HH in CMUdict's notation), but I haven't found anything (the list is a couple hundred lines long, but most of it is eliminable).
The one promising entry that I found was wherry, especially when I read a couple of OED definitions (I immediately thought ferry, perhaps etymologically or somehow), but no – the words don't share the etymology and the word wherry exists alongside ferry, and its pronunciation is unremarkable.
The next step is searching the OED and Webster, but I feel a little... disheartened, and it'd take a little too long on my machine.
I swear, sometimes I get downvoted for suggesting there is a formally correct, well-defined answer, and sometimes I get downvoted for saying there isn't (or if there is, that it doesn't matter the vast majority of the time).
Also, it seems like we get a rash of different questions from different people that have very similar answers. Today I've seen two "a noun can exist as both countable and uncountable" questions.
It’s kind of a fun word though because it can be a noun, transitive verb or intransitive verb, and as userr pointed out is easy to turn into an adjective
@SamBC I guess the basic words were all learnt in school and after that there was no need to learn more words. Just look up whatever you don't know in the dictionary.
@SamBC D'you think people are more likely to say There has been a lot of advertisements or There's been a lot of advertisements? Do you think the two are interchangeable?
@Jasper I don't think I've ever looked up a Croatian word in the dictionary (very infrequently I do because I'm not sure how it's spelled (in particular some words are spelled with je and some with ije – Russian dispenses with this by simply using e and reading it as je or some such)).
@userr2684291 well, they're grammatically interchangeable. I expect the contraction is more common, but then they usually are. I would see them as practically interchangeable.
@SamBC Well, as it turns out, they're not always grammatically interchangeable. See this answer.
Hm, I started the sentence there with I've managed to read... and then realized I haven't read a book in Croatian recently and switched to the high school period, thus invalidating my present perfect thingy.
@userr2684291 Ah, yes, that's true. But you definitely hear "there is a lot of plural". It may be that this developed as a corruption from an initial situation where only the contractions were used.
It's the questions with similar or closely related answers that come in quick succession that more make me wonder. I mean I don't think it means anyone has done anything wrong, it's just a coincidence.
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