Why pharaoh and not pharoah?
"Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Middle English pharao, from Old English, from Late Latin pharaon-, pharao, from Greek pharaO, "[MW]
Are there any other O words spelled with 'aoh'?
>>O words spelled with ao<<
From Wordnet, Princeton U. (Sorry, I can't give a url, I got it from Mac Sherlock using the dictionary channel. There is a good deal more, there. If anyone's interested, I can post it or PM it.):
The name is a compound, as some think, of the words Ra, the "sun" or "sun-god," and the article phe, "the," prefixed; hence phera, "the sun," or "the sun-god." But others, perhaps more correctly, think the name derived from Perao, "the great house" = his majesty = in Turkish, "the Sublime Porte."
If it's a compound, the 'a' would have been pronounced. Unfortunately, I don't know how to spell Paraoh in Hebrew (!) but I wouldn't be surprised if there were an alef of an ayin there, which might also have been pronounced as a gutteral 'ah'.
Since Egyptian pr‘ meant 'palace' originally lit. 'great house', it's unlikely that it meant 'the sun'. Pharaoh in Hebrew is par‘oh.
It's written with two phonetic signs, one for pr and the other for '3, which mean simply house and great. You can't get the sun/god name r' out of it, because those two consonants belong to different halves of the compound.