Pretty sure I never saw that in print until I was in my early 20s. Swear it took me 3 minutes to sound it out to realize it was a word I was familiar with.
Facade, I pronounced it like fay-kade, it was a move in Pokemon and as a youngling wasn't familiar with facades, then in school I read it in a story and figured it out thru context and felt like a genius and a moron all in 1
I think it's cause I knew the work "Arcade" before the word "Facade", and it's kinda embarrassing cause I never saw the actual word "Facade" (fasad) spelled out, so I thought they were two separate words💀
The spelling just makes absolutely no sense to the way it’s pronounced!!! It’s one of my biggest questions in life lol. There’s no “R” in that spelling so how in the hell does it say “kernel”?!
I said awry (awe ree) until I was corrected in high school reading aloud in theatre. After someone corrected me and it clicked I was like oh that’s why I never see “a rye” in written work.
I’ll never forget I wrote a paper in tenth grade, and I used the word awry. This girl, who wasn’t the most intelligent, was assigned to proof read my paper. She circled it and said I made the word up, and she wouldn’t listen to me that it was a real word. Anytime I read or hear the word awry, I get a good chuckle thinking of the dumb fuck who thought she was hot shit.
Faux. Folks. I still don't know how to pronounce faux. I used to say "fox" and now I say "faow" but I've also heard "fohw" so idk I'll just say fake. Folks still harms me I still can't think of how to say it. Do you say the L? Do you not?
Faux is pronounced the same way you say "Oh." "Foh." Folks is more of a dialect pronunciation, as a southerner, I personally say "Fohlks." L and all, but its not an emphasized part of the word.
i was a liberal studies major and my professors had all sorts of accents. this word was used A LOT. german, spanish/english (she was from spain but moved to the uk at a young age so picked up parts of both), and several dialects of english accents. they all said it HEJ-eh-moan-y and this is how i say it!
All throughout the Harry Potter books, both my husband and I thought Hermione's name was Her-me-own. Didn't get it until the movies and still think it wrong first. 😆
I read somewhere that J.K. Rowling specifically put the part where Hermione has to teach Victor Krum how to say her name in the book to teach people the proper pronunciation.
As a Swede, this is by far the hardest word for me to pronounce in English. I used to say it like “debb•t” or “deb•th” until I learned that you pronounce it something like “deht” with a very weak t
Rhapsody. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the ‘h’ so after much thought I landed on Reh-poss-oh-dee. I proudly told my uncle that I could play Bohemian Reh-poss-oh-dee on guitar hero and he’s never let me live that down.
Quaker, like Quaker Oats or the weird country folk that don’t fight or something. I think I was reading a book aloud to the class and I pronounced it Quack-ER and I shit you not I feel like the class collectively as a hive mind decided they would do nothing else with the rest of their lives aside from shaming me til I killed myself for it. Good times.
Yeah this one still haunts me. I always thought of it as Mel- launch-oly. Luckily it wasn’t a word I would have spoken very often so my shame remained hidden lol.
As a non-native english speaker, the first time I read Harry Potter in english was in my early-to-mid teens. I thought Hermione is pronounced "her-mee-one" until I saw it in english when I was 22. It's Hermiona (herr-mee-o-nah) in czech
Not me but my wife always pronounced fatigue as “fatty-gue” it was only when I heard her read side effects of medication out loud that she realised she had been doing it her whole life and nobody had said anything. It’s now pronounced fatty-gue in our house now and forever will be.
NCAA- read out loud in class as N-C-A-A. Teacher corrected me that it’s N-C-Double A. Very embarrassing in a sports crazy town. My family clearly wasn’t cool.
That’s one I just start typing letters into iOS and hope it corrects me. If you put a gun to my head and told me to spell it correctly or I would never get to see my family again, I would never see my family again.
I still remember the clerk at the ice cream counter at a Thrifty Drugstore in L.A. in about 1973 who laughed in my face when I ordered a "pint" without the long 'I'.
Queue
I didn't expect 80% of the letters to be useless
Came here to post this. I’m good now. But my wife still reads it as kway-way.
Uwu
Segue. Nothing to do with a two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter.
Mortified about how many times I’ve written Segway when I mean segue.. at my old age
Macabre
I was really confused about this at first but apparently U.K. and USA pronunciation is completely different
..I still don’t know this one. Enlighten me?
DANSE MACABRE
I still say Mak-uh-bray in my head when I see it
Everyone here is saying ma-cob but google translate says ma-ca-brah so I’m going to keep saying ma-ca-brah
Muh-Car-Bruh
Harbinger
Still read it har-bringer every first time
Honestly it still comes out as word soup when I say it.
Thanks Mass Effect 2 for clearing this one up for me.
Epitome.
My brain will never read this correctly the first time.
I'm 45 and my husband has let me mispronounce that word for 23 years! He finally corrected me. I feel like a dolt!
Lol I used to think it was Ep-Pit-Tome.
I thought there were two words, "epitomy" and "epitome" (epi-toam), which happened to mean more or less the same thing.
Pretty sure I never saw that in print until I was in my early 20s. Swear it took me 3 minutes to sound it out to realize it was a word I was familiar with.
For years I called the movie Armageddon “Are-Mega-don”, like a friggin prehistoric shark or something.
A big part of learning English is knowing where to put the emphasis in the word.
Haha good one
Facade, I pronounced it like fay-kade, it was a move in Pokemon and as a youngling wasn't familiar with facades, then in school I read it in a story and figured it out thru context and felt like a genius and a moron all in 1
Same here, from Pokémon and everything
I think it's cause I knew the work "Arcade" before the word "Facade", and it's kinda embarrassing cause I never saw the actual word "Facade" (fasad) spelled out, so I thought they were two separate words💀
Lmao I thought facade was fa-kay-d until I heard the move being used in an episode.
Same! But I pronounced it as "fuck aid", and I didn't know what fuck meant at the time. Good thing I didn't use that word in normal conversations.
English really needs to adopt accents like the cedille in ç for façade :)
Hyperbole
Hyper-Bowl.
The worst part is how long it took me to realise hyperbole WAS "hyper-ba-lee" and wasn't a different word.
my english teacher had us say it twice, so im thankful for that
Hospice. As a child, I thought it was pronounced hoe-spice. 🤦♂️
Long lost 6th Spice Girl
BANDNAME
Reading a passage out loud in class and coming across the word “annal” 😳
Mine is banal!
“In the anals of history he…..I mean annals…” lol
Colonel
Same, eventhough i know the pronunciation is "kernel" but i sometimes mistaken as "kolonel" 😭
The spelling just makes absolutely no sense to the way it’s pronounced!!! It’s one of my biggest questions in life lol. There’s no “R” in that spelling so how in the hell does it say “kernel”?!
Yup that's a good one lol
Beatrice.
awry and futile
I said awry (awe ree) until I was corrected in high school reading aloud in theatre. After someone corrected me and it clicked I was like oh that’s why I never see “a rye” in written work.
I’ll never forget I wrote a paper in tenth grade, and I used the word awry. This girl, who wasn’t the most intelligent, was assigned to proof read my paper. She circled it and said I made the word up, and she wouldn’t listen to me that it was a real word. Anytime I read or hear the word awry, I get a good chuckle thinking of the dumb fuck who thought she was hot shit.
Awry for me too. Thought it was aww-ree for years, even after I knew what awry should sound like.
Nigeria... 4th grade...
Oops.
Me with Niger in front of the class :/
They got me with Niger in 4th grade too
"Ayo pass me the skin coloured pencil" sound familiar?/j
Unshed. Like unshed tears. I thought it was pronounced like it rhymes with ‘punched’.
This is my favorite one. And I will never read that word again without reading it that way!
Ah yes. I love a good unsh in the morning.
Faux. Folks. I still don't know how to pronounce faux. I used to say "fox" and now I say "faow" but I've also heard "fohw" so idk I'll just say fake. Folks still harms me I still can't think of how to say it. Do you say the L? Do you not?
Faux is pronounced the same way you say "Oh." "Foh." Folks is more of a dialect pronunciation, as a southerner, I personally say "Fohlks." L and all, but its not an emphasized part of the word.
Fo. Like fo sho, homie
I used to think hegemony was pronounced HEG-oh-MOE-nee instead he-JEM-oh-NEE
Enders Shadow series had me reading it like that the whole time.
i was a liberal studies major and my professors had all sorts of accents. this word was used A LOT. german, spanish/english (she was from spain but moved to the uk at a young age so picked up parts of both), and several dialects of english accents. they all said it HEJ-eh-moan-y and this is how i say it!
TIL
As a non-native... CHOIR. Just why?
Genre
The Jen-ree!
Jon-ra
When I was in 1st grade I hadn't heard Adidas said out loud so I legitimately had no idea how to pronounce it.
As I know British and Americans pronounce it in different ways
There is still quite a gap on this one between Americans and Brits lol
All throughout the Harry Potter books, both my husband and I thought Hermione's name was Her-me-own. Didn't get it until the movies and still think it wrong first. 😆
I read somewhere that J.K. Rowling specifically put the part where Hermione has to teach Victor Krum how to say her name in the book to teach people the proper pronunciation.
Her-moyne for me...and Drack-oh.
That’s almost how it sounds in portuguese, which was the version I read, so even though it’s spelled the same, it’s pronounced her-me-own-ee
I clued in while reading book 4 and viktor krum is written pronouncing her name phonetically. Still didn’t save me from saying ”professor snap-eh” 🤓
I did the same for Hermione and I read Dumbledore as Dum-bleh-door the entire series. My world was turned upside down when I watched the first movie
Lingerie... the first time I pronounced it was as a senior in high school.. I pronounced it exactly how it's spelled
Can't remember my age at the time but I'd just learned about the silent "e" that many English words have.
Don’t feel bad, the former president of the United States pronounced it “Yo Semite”.
Yarmulke. I pronounced it phonetically... Everyone laughed. I had heard the word but, damn, silent R and L???
I thought that yarmulke and yamaka were different things until I was 25. Same with dachshund and doxon (until I was 22 or so I think)
Well, 32 years old and I can confidently say I've never seen that word written out before and had no idea what it was.
I didn’t know that one, but I guess it’s probably because we don’t really have a Jewish community in my neck of the woods.
worcestershire
It's correctly pronounced as fast as you can with a subject change so no one notices you have no idea how to say it. It's fine, they don't either.
Woostashur
Isn't it pronounced "Wooster shur"?
Cacophony.
To give you credit, anything Gaelic based is weird as sin. And I just looked into the actual Gaelic and it's even worse: sail éille
I’m 44 years old and don’t know the pronunciation or meaning of the last word.
Debt.
As a Swede, this is by far the hardest word for me to pronounce in English. I used to say it like “debb•t” or “deb•th” until I learned that you pronounce it something like “deht” with a very weak t
bourgeois
No one ever expects the French Inquisition Pronunciation.
Seeing a lot of words of French origin on this post: bourgeois, macabre, genre, facade, lingerie, queue, etc
Penelope
Penny Lope
Peen-elope
Archive "Are- Chive" 😂
Fatigue. I used to pronounce it "fah-ti-goo".
I told my parents I was fat-e-gued when I was about 12 they laughed for about 3 hours
"Fatty-gay".
Rhapsody. I couldn’t figure out what to do with the ‘h’ so after much thought I landed on Reh-poss-oh-dee. I proudly told my uncle that I could play Bohemian Reh-poss-oh-dee on guitar hero and he’s never let me live that down.
TIL that half of my vocabulary is wrong
Calliope
In New Orleans there is a Calliope Street and it is pronounced “CALLY-ope”.
Ethereal. Totally thought it was pronounced "ether-reel."
Organism
My teacher once made that mistake. He owned it like a boss
Lol
"Mature" - I thought it was pronounced like "nature"
A mature creature in nature shoveling manure with a lure
I read "nowhere" as "now here" out loud to the class in fourth grade.
Tanzania I still think it should be pronounced Tan-zay-nia
In my experience, in Tanzania they pronounce it both Tan-zuh-nee-u and Tan-zahn-nee-u. So you aren’t too far off
I blame Tasmania for how it pronounced this word.
Grotesque
Papyrus. Used to pronounce it ‘pappy-russ’
It isn't??
Caveat
Subtle
I put the "b" in subtle
Omni. Potent.
Quaker, like Quaker Oats or the weird country folk that don’t fight or something. I think I was reading a book aloud to the class and I pronounced it Quack-ER and I shit you not I feel like the class collectively as a hive mind decided they would do nothing else with the rest of their lives aside from shaming me til I killed myself for it. Good times.
Parental Guidance. Pronounced guidance as "gooey dance"
I think that might be how they became parents
Phlegm
To be fair, phlegm makes anything hard to pronounce, including phlegm.
You shouldnt feel bad for mispronouncing a word, because it means you learned it by reading.
Banal. 100% no doubts about it
Worst one for me is Pint. Still feel like it should be pin-t not pi-nt.
I still don't know how to say gif...
That’s bait.
Horse divorce
“Whores devores. Yo! Food Boy!”
Kept pronouncing Regina as “rah-gie-nah” (like vagina) and everyone had to correct me because it was a school play
There is a town in Saskatchewan named Regina, pronounced like vagina.... Or at least that's what Letterkenny has led me to believe lol
D-nice. A a ron. Jay kwalin etc
Hear that at least once a week. “You ever seen the Key and Peele skit?!” No, you are the first person to ever bring it up to me.
Not mine, but:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
of which my user is derived
Always got me too
Tapestry
Had a friend say ‘comdom’ - don’t think any of us ever corrected them lol
Surprise.
Dachshund
Melancholy. But to be fair to me…. Melon colly?Really?!
Yeah this one still haunts me. I always thought of it as Mel- launch-oly. Luckily it wasn’t a word I would have spoken very often so my shame remained hidden lol.
Segue and segway are not two different words...
Well they are, segway is the 2 wheeled vehicle thing
[удалено]
I’ll bite… how did you pronounce it?
Chameleon
As a non-native english speaker, the first time I read Harry Potter in english was in my early-to-mid teens. I thought Hermione is pronounced "her-mee-one" until I saw it in english when I was 22. It's Hermiona (herr-mee-o-nah) in czech
Not me but my wife always pronounced fatigue as “fatty-gue” it was only when I heard her read side effects of medication out loud that she realised she had been doing it her whole life and nobody had said anything. It’s now pronounced fatty-gue in our house now and forever will be.
NCAA- read out loud in class as N-C-A-A. Teacher corrected me that it’s N-C-Double A. Very embarrassing in a sports crazy town. My family clearly wasn’t cool.
No need to feel embarrassed. That’s sort of pretentious of your teacher depending on how they corrected you. Plenty of people say it both ways.
Stoic
Diarrhea
That’s one I just start typing letters into iOS and hope it corrects me. If you put a gun to my head and told me to spell it correctly or I would never get to see my family again, I would never see my family again.
Per-suh-phone instead of Per-sef-a-Knee 😂Persephone😂
Carotid (You know, the very important carrow-tid artery)
I still remember the clerk at the ice cream counter at a Thrifty Drugstore in L.A. in about 1973 who laughed in my face when I ordered a "pint" without the long 'I'.
Celtic...it wasn't another reader but a basketball fan who eventually corrected me.
Celtic is only Seltic when referring to the teams though.
Delicacy (deli sassy 💁♀️)
Me when I go into a sandwich shop and they know my order.
‘Meme’ I used to pronounce it ‘meh-meh’ ‘Dictator’ Used to pronounce ‘Dick-tutor’ ‘Calendar’ Used to pronounce ‘slender’
Dick-tutor 😳
I was reading the apollyon series around, 12 or 13, and I Came across the word "orgasm" I legitimately thought it was pronounced organism
I used to think ‘suffice’ was pronounced like suh-fiss 😬
Rendezvous. Annihilate.
"Melancholy." All the emphasis was wrong. Pronounced it sort of like "mel-AN-co-LEE."
Did you perhaps feel an infinite sadness from this?
Maintenance as "maintainance"
The name Sean
It will always bother me that the actor Sean Bean isn’t either “Shawn Bahn” Or “Seen Been”
lol yes, my good buddy “seen”
February 🫣 I still can't pronounce it in english...
Detritus
Infrared
Dysentery. I definitely thought it was diss-sent-urr-eee with the stress on sent.
Chagrin (char-gin)
Preface, i thought prE-face while it’s pref-Us
Rural
As in Rural Juror?
Hostipal
Plaid. Facetious. Epitome.
just read all 213 comments
Macabre
Arkansas
Not to be confused with nearby state, “Kan Saw”
Orangutang. I pronounced it Orange-a-tang. It just popped out.
Naive, oh the irony! I was naive for so long pronouncing naive as naiv.