oasisn.

Etymology: < classical Latin Oasis, the name of a fertile place in the Libyan desert < ancient Greek Ὄασις (Herodotus; compare Hellenistic Greek Αὔσις (Strabo)) < ancient Egyptian wḫ'-ṭ; compare Coptic ouahe dwelling-place ( > Arabic wāḥ, wāḥa oasis). Compare Middle French, French oasis (feminine, occasionally masculine; 1561 as place name, 1766 as common noun, 1811 (masculine) in figurative use ( > Italian †oasis (1819 as plural, 1821–3 as singular), oasi (singular; 1841)), Spanish oasis (1847). Compare German †Oasis (1740), Oase (1817 in plural Oasen), Swedish †oasis (1814), oas (1814 in plural oaser).As to the quantity of the a in ancient Greek or Hellenistic Greek and classical Latin there appears to be no evidence. The tradition of the schools, and the preponderance of English usage, as well as the practice of the poets, make it long. In German Oˈáse (which replaced Oasis in the first half of the 19th cent.) the a is long and stressed; compare Swedish oás. Spanish oasis also has the stress on the penultimate syllable, and is possibly after the English or French word; Italian oasi is stressed on the first syllable. N.E.D. records also the pronunciation (ō^u·ăsis) /ˈəʊəsɪs/ and notes that it was particularly common in Scotland and the U.S. Several late 19th- and early 20th-cent. U.S. sources, including Funk's Stand. Dict. (1893), Funk & Wagnall's New Standard Dict. Eng. Lang. (1931) and Webster (1911, 1934) give this as an alternative, and Worcester (1846, 1860) gives it as the only pronunciation. All editions of D. Jones Eng. Pronouncing Dict. up to and including the twelfth edition (1963) record /əˈeɪsɪs/ as a variant pronunciation.