How to pronounce "worried"?

In North America, worry most often rhymes with furry, blurry, and slurry. That’s the same vowel as in fur, blur, and slur ’round these parts. This is also the same vowel as the one in yer, per, purr, her, sir, sure, fir, burr, knur, slur, whirr, and were. In fact our worry sounds pretty much just like “were” with an extra -y tacked on to the end. Now just add a d for worried, and you’re done.

In contrast, the North American worry usually does not rhyme with any of sorry, quarry, lorry, berry, bury, curie, carry, Carrie, dairy, ferry, glory, Rory, story, cherry, Terry, tarry, very, wary, weary, marry, merry, Mary, Harry, or Laurie — nor even with Larry, Moe, or Curly.

Lastly, the North American worry almost certainly does not rhyme with an Indian sari.

Beyond that, your mileage may, can, will, and surely shall vary. And why sure, I could give you the IPA for my version of worry and worried (respectively /ˈwɜɹi/ and /ˈwɜɹid/), but you said you don’t understand IPA symbols. This makes it next to impossible to talk about pronunciations, because you have no symbolic way of specifying pronunciations. That’s probably why you’ve received no answers yet.

However, even if you did know what the IPA symbols actually meant, they might not do you as much good as you might think: many of those words themselves have multiple possible pronunciations, depending on various mergers and regional accents.

The best I can do is give you rhyme-sets, but mine and thine are surely miles, leagues, and even oceans apart, so what good would that do you if I did? So I can’t tell you how you “should” pronounce worry, per your request. Then again, nobody else can do that either, so I don’t feel so bad.

At best, I can only tell you how I do so. Which is what I’ve tried to do. I guarantee you that many people reading this won’t pronounce all / many / some / any of these the way I myself do anyway. So please don’t think I expect you to pronounce it like me, of course; I expect you to pronounce it like worry. :)

All joking aside, I don’t know what more you are looking for here. You may wish to update your question a bit so that it can be answered.

IPA sounds good, perhaps if you have enough of them you'd both pronounce worried exactly the same. I don't know the International Phonetic Alphabet either, but found it described somewhere as 'wur-eed' or 'wuhr-'. 'Wur-eed' is the way I pronounce worried, but that doesn't preclude other pronunciations.

Here in NSW there has been a sectarian division in pronunciation of "worry" and similar words where there's a Middle English historie :-) of "minims". For minims in general see Wikipedia's page Minim_(palaeography).

When I studied English at USyd in the 1970s the story was that the Catholic "spelling pronunciation" (rhyming with "lorry") had come from a single nun with a strong opinion on the topic, who had enforced it on all of her students, many of whom became teachers.

I can't find evidence to back that up, but this is interesting: What's the current scholarly opinion on the "minims" explanation for the spelling of "love", "tongue," etc?

Mari-Lou asked for the reference to OED confirming "Worry" rhymes with "Curry". Here is one reference: Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Fourth Edition. pg 973 "Wo'rry (Wu)" The "u" has a symbol above it indicating it's the vowel sound in "ruck" pg 196 "Cu'rry" The "u" has the same symbol above it indicating it's the vowel sound in "ruck" JudithM