me, unbearably pretentious 9 year old: oh the room looks so picturesque* *pronounced picture skew

👋 reporting for duty!!

I cemented my reputation as one of the cool kids in high school by publicly pronouncing myself very SUB-tile.

I did that too! How were we to know, English is so weird

I spent an entire year saying cupboard like it's spelled. I still think you're all weird for saying it the other way.

Many, many audio narrators agree with you but only for cupboard’s cousin clapboard. /Kla bərd/ kla’s a is like clap but the p isn’t even a glottal stop. Mixed bag on their step cousin, the insult Blackguard…

Been talking to contractors of late and they look at me funny when I say "clabberd." Are they really expecting "clap-board"? Also I keep getting in trouble with calling an introductory overview a "primmer." When I say "primer" I mean a preparatory layer or something that helps set off an explosion.

Maybe they think you want curdled milk on the walls? 😉😄

The only people I know who know about clabbered milk also pronounce clapboard correctly.

😁

Wait, milk?!?

Well, cream. When you're making butter, for example, and it starts to separate into whey and butterfat, it is starting to clabber.

Some are primmer than a primrose.

Do they even use clapboard anymore? I hear shakes, siding, & Hardy Board. While I’m reliably informed an introductory text is a /Prim-er/ it doesn’t make sense! I champion /Prime-er/ in all 3 uses since a “primmer” primer is also a preparatory layer [of education] to prime one for more learning.

We were trying to talk about different appearances for Hardie board, because you can get it to look like shakes or like, well, clapboard. I think of "clapboard" as what you call the siding that looks like clapboard. Like we have aluminum siding but it's still clapboard style.

I gave up on renovating a house after I became too disabled to finish it myself AND had multiple contractors repeatedly not understand what I was asking for, though I thought they were common tasks, so I can only offer commiseration at meeting unexpected befuddlement in that quarter.

FWIW I think we use the terms similarly. the rehab house had nice clapboard style steel siding and my current one has more of a shakes aesthetic but from wide durable, dare I say hardy, boards that are hopefully not made of asbestos.

The worst one for me for the longest time was awry. I said it as ah-ree for the longest time.

Guilty. Also segue was seeg. Even though I heard people using it correctly, I didn’t connect the dots.

It took me a *very* long time to realise that the Segway (which I pronounced "sedge-way") wheeled vehicles were pronounced the same way as the word segue ("sè-goo? sèg?"). I blame Sigue Sigue Sputnik for at least some of the confusion.

Never made the Sigue Sigue Sputnik connection- that could be a contributor!

I almost bit my tongue off keeping myself from blurting out “that’s how it’s pronounced??” when a professor had segue on the board and said segway and not seg-you like I thought I was. Had heard it plenty of times, knew it meant what segue did, thought it was two different words.

Well, I mean, who would? not English speakers

Same yes, I just assumed that the spoken word "uh-rye" and the word awry in my books, which I said "aw-ree" in my head, were different words that both meant something like "off track"

Yes — i knew that “choir” was a synonym for (quire)…

“The whores devores* look simply scrumptious” *hors d'oeuvres

As a kid I pronounced it "hours devours."

I had an art teacher who would exclaim "horse doovers!" when she was calling bs. I haven't pronounced hors d'oeuvres correctly since

Not completely unrelated but when i was catering my mom wanted to know what we served and i earnestly told her "tube steak"

"You haven't met the cook! 😉" (Very niche reference, sorry)

My dad always called them Horses Doovreys

🐎 Dover

My father unironically pronounced it that way to his dying day. Even after multiple people corrected him (including me, who for a while majored in French). He insisted his pronunciation was correct. But I went years saying "DEB-acle" and "MYZE-eld" (misled*), and rhyming "banal" with "anal".

* Some of my earliest writings used other tenses: "She's misling us," "What if we misle him?" etc. I still mourn the loss of this verb. #WriteSky

Finding new examples like this often makes me very gruntled. 😀

May i offer you the verb “to infrare”? It’s something they do with light. (Me, saying the 2-syllable word “infrared” in science class.)

Oooh, I love the sound of that. Seems like something Terry Pratchett or Lewis Carroll might've playfully made a bit of their worldbuilding.

As a kid I got it into my head that "erstwhile" meant "esteemed" or "respected" and that lasted until I made an observation at the dinner table about my very much still alive "erstwhile Grandfather"

lolol

This was exactly the response at the table, after a few seconds of stunned silence. I remained a pretentious little snot, of course, but it did sting a bit.

I was so insulted when my second grade teacher was taken aback by toe-ard, and insisted toward was pronounced tord. Hrumph.

I once wrote "my ersatz girlfriend" (meaning "erstwhile") in a bit of memoir. Worse yet, I sent her a copy.

I did the reverse in one of my novels, called a character’s flailing attempt at a garden “erstwhile” when I meant “ersatz”. Was quite mortified when my editor caught it.

¿Por qué no los dos?

¿Por qué no?

Por que las palabras tiene significa. You people are clearly members of The Lexical Anarchist Front, and I will be reporting you to the authorities.

Natural order of events, Tim. An ersatz attempt at a garden logically becomes an erstwhile attempt at a garden. Ergo, both.

Don't get me wrong, I have often successfully pretended that my mistakes were intentional. You just need to own it!

With me it was “caution” which I figured meant “baggage” because on the bus there were “caution racks overhead” and also road signs for “caution lorries”. Until I dramatically asked my parents, packing for our holiday, how we were going to get “all that caution” into the car.

Also I figured “reluctantly” meant “with relish” (because it often fit the context, and also just the SOUND - it’s almost onomatopoeic). Until offered a treat and said I accepted “reluctantly”. I still wish it meant that.

I love this!! ❤️🥰

I did the exact same thing to a boss at my first job! It was a newspaper, so my references to “the erstwhile editor” were met with bemusement.

He he, That's a pretty common rookie error!

Took me forever to figure out what erstwhile meant.

I learned how to pronounce gauche from a Taylor Swift song. My whole life until 2021 I mentally pronounced it gowsh

Which song? Cause I vividly remember messing it up during an 8th grade history project and I still don't know for sure lol

The last great American dynasty. It has a long O sound. If you listen to the song, it’s the lyric that says, “the wedding was charming, if a little gauche…”

Thank you!

My kid pronounced bishop as bis-hop. Union and onion were pronounced the same, as in the con-fa-dercy fought the onion.

To be fair, out of "onion", "anion", and "union", only one of them looks like it absolutely should not be pronounced onion and that's the one that means onion.

The difference between a plumber and a physicist is how they pronounce unionized.

I always thought segue was pronounced sēg. 😄

But really, azure should rhyme with azul! What other English words have a zh?!

I have a friend (PhD in clinical psych) who pronounces gamut as GAMOOT, because that's how she figured it was pronounced the first time she read it.

Driving along the Blue Ridge Pkwy, an only child with my parents, 9 years old, I exclaimed, “what a picture skew view”; they laughed (of course) but then shared all their mispronunciations from when they were young readers. Knowing we shared this experience helped immensely.

My mom shared how she mispronounced “peninsula” as she read out loud in class 😳

What did you think where they made those writing utensils?

The always picture skew Montesquieu

Me, as a very pretentious 8 year old: "I have very good pronunciation*" *Pronounced pro-noun-ciation Of all the words to mispronounce!

Long I in horizon so obviously long I in horizontal…

Draught v drowt

This made my evening. Huge smiles all around.

lol my dad would do that one on purpose when we were at particularly picture-skew locations. Naturally I have used that at my children.

Even now I just feel “hyper bowl” makes more sense than “hi purr bo lee”.

For me it was façade. Fack aid

I am the family bookworm. My first sighting of a "lingerie" store on a shopping trip is a thing of family legend.

Lingering in front of it, weren't you?

Indeed

I read books about space, books about dinosaurs, books about math, etc. (pronounced "e-tick")

Me saying pier when I was younger, my family never let me forget.

Me thinking guacamole was pronounced GYUU-uh-cuh-mole (like the animal)

aesthetic. halp!

The day I said “So crates” in freshman English.

Please tell me you also said "Beeth-oven"!

For real though, we used to have a game/puzzle store called Socrates and I didn't learn how to pronounce it correctly until a friend who worked there mentioned it in conversation. 😅

My three words are origin, mosaic, and hegemony. I still have to to think through them them deliberately when I want to say them, and there is still about a thirty percent chance I will say them wrong

Like I had to look Up Hermione in Harry Potter.

when I was also about 9-ish, confidently telling my gathered relatives that one of them had committed a fox pass

I pronounced it ‘picture-skwee’ at a scenic overlook. Sadly ‘squee’ hadn’t been invented yet, so I couldn’t pretend I was doing a clever word play.

My middle school self tried this with comatose* *prounounced comma-toes

I didn't know how to pronounce palanquin until I was in my 40s and I heard it used in an episode of Steven Universe.

I'm in my 60s and I litterarily had to look it up.

For a while when I was young, prejudice became "pre judas"

Did something similar for GRAH-teh-skyoo ("grotesque")

Maniacally. Obviously pronounced maniac + alley, said in iambic pentameter. Nailed it!

Surely iambic dimeter?

I definitely pronounced Penelope like cantaloupe.

Penny-lope? Yes, absolutely. See also Genevieve. Or Jon-vee-ev, as I used to call her.

French speaker?

Clearly not well enough!

For me it was "benign". Didn't find out until much later that it wasn't pronounced "bennigin".

I was convinced that “Geof” was pronounced Gee-off.

Regardless of pronunciation, I still read it as such.

me, coming across the word etiquette at about that age: etti-kwet

Sort of opposite of this but the very first time I read the word cojones in print rather than just hearing it said out loud, I was reading an article to some friends when I was around 19 and I pronounced it co-jones and immediately knew I had done something wrong. I’m STILL embarrassed.

All those leaves were foilage and the lone soldier on the lookout was a centennial

until my dying day I will remember the look of mild panic on my introverted Catholic father’s face when my sister got “lust” and “luster” confused in trying to describe something shiny and asked “well what’s ‘lust’ then??” with her tiny exasperated hands on hips

*laughs in adult-child, having experienced being the exasperated youngster in the face of obdurate grown-up silence*

well, that’s describing what sounds like a totally different scenario

Ah, okay. I mis-applied "introverted". Apologies.

Once when I was a kid, in Sunday school I was called on to read a verse from the Bible. I was a very shy, easily flustered kid. The verse I had to read contained the word gentiles. The way I mispronounced it made the Sunday school teacher turn bright red 😅

I’m Jewish, and there is no actual comfortable way of saying gentile out loud unless I am in a roomful of Jews. Now, I did use it once to tell a bunch of Mormons at my door to fuck off. English was their second language, and when I told them “I don’t talk biblical interpretation with gentiles”, 1/

The one guy in the back said “no, you are a gentile, that’s our word”, and I said “oh no, you don’t understand, you stole that word from my people without permission, I know you folks are real Christians, and you keep trying to steal our identity and culture. Now go away and don’t come back.”

And they had the fucking gall to pull this shit hours before it was time to fast. I try to tell doorknockers politely to not come back, but they were repeat offenders.

Lust, not leased.

He held the rank of co-low-nell* in the armed forces *Colonel

I pronounced grotesque grow-teh-skew. A 50+ year old work friend pronounced facsimile face-eh-mill.

Are you sure she's wrong?

She's right about most things which is why that stood out.

I don't think that's pretentious. 🤔 Just trying out your new toys. Myself I said chime-er-ah instead of kai-MEER-ah when talking about the chimera. IDK why I said that instead of CHIME-ra but there we go.

Oh man. In 5th grade I had to read a passage with the name Phoebe in it. Of course, I pronounced it foe-bee.

Flobeeee

I first encountered "Penelope" while READING ALOUD IN CLASS I read it as pene-lope, to many chuckles. My teacher did not correct me at any point, the next student reader after me just pronounced it the right way and that's how I learned I was wrong 😭

Rhymes with envelope, right? 😊 Solidarity.

Indeed it does 😅

Oh man, at least my teacher stopped and corrected me. That's brutal!

I had to write a report about Chopin.

Probably pronouced the name right. de.forvo.com/search/Fryde...

Did you use a Chopin cart?

Or a Chopin block?

Sigmund Fucking Freud In front of psychiatrists, no less

That’s not fair

::shakes fist at Trivial Pursuit for doing me dirty::

Oh no. Did they make you read it put loud??

Thankfully my mother was the lone witness to the pronunciation butchering that followed.

me, having just been corrected at the Vietnamese place: I think it’s FUH-bee

I used to like the story of The Dong with the loom in his nose 🤷‍♂️

In my experience the single syllable "fobe" -- rhymes with "lobe" -- is common

Aged 7, reading aloud a fairy tale in class: “Ug, said Beauty when she saw the Beast’s face. Ug, Ug” (ugh)

I said malevolent like- male- vole- ent into my 20s until a guy said spell that for me. I can also spell very well

That's so great. My best was "mack-a-burr". My mother viscerally shuddered, and corrected me; "macabre. It's macabre, Storm." My worst was "my-zled", instead of "misled".

Ah man, I said my-zled for way too long! Kid me thought it was some old English word for having been tricked out of money. Like, by a miser or something 😅

My wife says “my-zeld” out loud as an inside joke and my daughter was 16 before she realized that her mom was mispronouncing it on purpose

Thays fantastic, lol.

I said "mack-a-brrr" out loud in front of my peers in college. I mean, I had heard and used the word mu-cobb, and if I had thought about it, I probably would have told you the two independent words were synonyms. I'm still mortified.

I did the same thing with Kay-os, which as a kid I understood the meaning of and could use in conversation, but did not at all connect with the word chaos (cha-ohs) that I seemed to encounter only in books.

I'm having a Mac a'Burr with coke and fries.

No need for mortification! As the reply post says *It means you learned it from reading* specifically reading beyond your existing vocabulary at the time. That’s impressive. Me, I randomly reassembled reconnoiter into /re Con ə TIER/ for which there’s less justification. AFAIK I’m not dyslexic.

OH I was like fourteen when I worked "misled" out! Still sad about it ngl. "Misle" makes such an evocative verb.

me, younger, "ren dez vuuus"

for me “hyper bowl”

Oh god. The cringe flashbacks off this post! Hyperbole as hyper-bowl is mine.

Super Bowl was Yesterday

I developed the habit of never trying a word ending in -ough until i was certain i heard an adult say it. Never.

My fourth-grade teacher had a (hand-made) poster hanging in our classroom that showed "the eight different ways to pronounce 'ough' in English". Really prepped me for later when I found out there were even more than that.

At five, I was quite fond of anti-kews.

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn aww-reee

Hey, you might say I'm the eppi-tome of that.

😄

Samesame

Ah, yes! This was one of mine.

ooh yeah that one got me

My older cousin travels the world. We were at a basketball game one time and I said something I don't remember. She was quiet for a while as we watched the game then she said something like "I figured it out. You know the words but only from reading them."

It’s not just as a kid. In my first job out of college I was talking to a partner at the firm about National Parks when I mentioned Yosemite, pronouncing it as Yos-eh-mite. I was very concerned at the time that I had just killed my career when he corrected me. 🤦‍♀️

I'm a different flavor of eye rollingly awful. I always loved foreign languages, so I usually got pronunciations right. But I was so rigid about it that once, playing trivial pursuit, I missed a question about the "ya-KOO-za". When I heard the answer, I said "Oh! I would have gotten that if you'd

said "YA-koo-za"." 🙄 My friends have never let me forget it -- and rightly so.

I was in Japan for work for a while and got used to ordering AH-sa-hi when I wanted a beer. Went to Australia shortly after and tried to order it that way and got blank stares. (There and in the US it’s Ah-SAH-hi).

I can just imagine! 😂

Hey!

Bosom pronounced Boss-Um

My first grade teacher laughed at me for pronouncing the w in sword

Hey! Happened a lot, often to the amusement of my audience. Heck, I still don’t know how to pronounce “moue.”

It’s pronounced MOO… but not long and drawn out, like from a cow.

Present.

Heeeehy

hey! 😂

oh ya. i read the dictionary for fun as a kid, but that sure didn't guarantee i'd know how to pronounce words like "misled" (which i thought sounded like "mice-ld" lol

My dad thought it was "mizzled".

Shush, you two, everyone knows it's MIZE-Əld

At a college Quiz Bowl practice, we got the question "Name Marx's two social classes." I rang in and proudly answered, "The proletariat and the bore-gee-oh-see!" I was then very confused when everyone laughed. And I still have to consciously work to say it the right way!

I like it your way.

But you got the point, right? Because I'm about to throw hands for colllege you if that didn't count.

Thank you! I got the point.

Didn't realize that "rendezvous" was that word they kept saying on The Next Generation.

Feel free to guess how I said aisle when I was five.

Heeey!! Names I embarrassed myself over: Persephone, Penelope, Wagner. Words I didn’t know how to say but knew what they meant: paradigm, anxiety, and so many more. Wooof.

learned that "epitome" was a word and "EH-pih-tohm" was not at around 13. my grandmother, who was a legit genius, learned "chay-ose" was not a word at 50. apparently it runs in the family

“in-dick-ted” here 👋🏼 (Indicted)

same here! 👋

Just as 'interdict' (interdickt')… oh, wait…

Me at 6: what’s imbibbing? My sister: say that again? Me: imbibbing? My sister: in a sentence? Me: he was found to have been imbibbing alcohol My sister laughing her arse off: you mean im-bye-bing. Drinking too much. Me: ok, what’s stiffling? My sister: Do you mean stye-fling? Me: I think so?

I caused complete pandemonium reading the word “banal” out loud in a freshman auditorium

Assuage

Same. It’s been 30 years and I’m still mortified

Oh my god I still don’t know how tf I’m supposed to pronounce “banal” in English. It’s funny because I’m noticing a lot of these words ppl struggled with are French (chagrin, hors d’œuvre, façade, etc).

I learned hors d'oeuvre from books and in my head I pronounced it "whores de vore." I don't think I even made the connection from the written version to the spoken French version (which I had heard) until well into my late teens 😅

Horsie-doover!

I still like to say "horse doovers" for fun.

Wait, is it NOT pronounced like it rhymes with "anal"? Boy I've suree dodged a bullet by not ever saying that aloud

Apparently not! 😅

Deleted because I realized I was using a regionalism, sorry!

I didn't actually see what you said so don't worry about it lmao

Oh, another one I see a lot, especially in gaming, is people saying mee-lee when they mean may-lay.

I just gave up on pronouncing MEE-lee correctly and filed it away as a subcultural usage.

At some point DnD people started saying ar-CANN-uh instead of ar-CAY-nuh for arcana.

Same vein: It's apparently PAL-ə-din, not Pə-LA-din. Still only get it right half the time.

I'll never forget when I was a kid and getting into D&D, my Mom telling me, when she could catch her breath from laughing, that its gel-A-tinous cube, not gelatin-ous cube.

Paladin and the Pforty Pthieves?

I'm half right then - I pronounce it 'mee-lay'. Occasionally game VAs get something comically wrong, like one pronouncing 'brazier' as 'brassiere' in Dragon Age: The Veilguard. 😁

That may be an accent issue. New Zealanders play swapsies with vowels. We do pronounce it mee-lee. Also sex=six & six=sex

Trading these comments is giving me some anxiety about whether I know how to pronounce anything 🤣

Argh, typo, "reading these..."

hors d'oeuvre. Looked something like "whores doover" to little me.

I managed to mispronounce sarcastic despite it being fairly intuitive 😅

I was fully 25 pronouncing surreptitious as “surr-up-tchuss” and diatomaceous as “dichotomus”

Saw "doubt" a lot as a kid reading and distinctly remember saying, "da-butt," in my head.

Debt was first deb-t then deb-it for me because I heard debit on the news, then finally saw it in the paper and figured out they were two different words. Don't remember how I learned to connect it to det.

When my son was five he found his sister’s kid’s book on babies. “Mom! Did you know babies come from the uterus? It’s also called the womb!” Of course, he pronounced them “utter-us” and the other rhymed with bomb…

somebody utter us the bomb

Watt ewe sei?

Hey

Bonus: I read a ton of British authors so my spelling was peppered with ou's and ae's that my teachers didn't appreciate. And bloody is still my favourite mild curse.

Awry and albeit. Those were my two.

Fatigue.

Macabre.

Lascivious

Yes! It was lah-VAY-shuss, which sounded way more lascivious than lascivious does.

Lash-i-Vicious. Sneering with a menacing vibe.

Sepulchre

I still have no idea how to pronounce that one.

Well, as I learned the hard way, it's not mac-a-burr.

Nor is it fa-ti-gyew.

Hey

Ugh. Can't pronounce OR spell them.

"Underfed" as "un-derfed", clearly the opposite of "derfed"

Didn't figure out tertiary until just before HS. (As it turns out, it's not pronounced terry-a-terry! 🤭)

HEY

I thought subtle and suttle were two different words for years and years, never noticed that no-one ever said subtle, and I'd never seen suttle written down. Found out during a family word game to much laughter at my expense.

I thought debt and debit were the same until I saw debit on print

Hor-a-zon. instead of “horizon

Kid, teen, young adult, occasionally moonlighting as a pastime as I approach 40. At least my friends get a laugh out of it.

I didn't know how to pronounce "genre" for a long time. Or "chaos." Hmm...a lot of words from Poe and Lovecraft, as I read them when I was pretty young. "Squamous" and "congeries." (I still don't know how to pronounce that one.)

I know most of the flowery adjectives from both of them were mispronounced in my head for sure.

The first time I read the word simulacra it was misspelled, so it stuck as simalcra/simulcra in my head for a long time until I finally heard it out loud with an 'extra' syllable and realized I'd been reading it wrong the whole time

Also 'sachet' and 'compass'. Sachet I actually had right to begin with but then someone 'corrected' me and made me doubt myself

My parents skipped me 2 grades after we moved here from the UK. The school initially agreed (based on testing) but I still remember mispronouncing the word island as is land.

Oh yes. Thank you!

Hey 🖖🏻

Macabre Epitome Genre

indict. Still and forever.

I pronounced Macabre as “Mack-a-burr” until my dad nearly choked during dinner when I used it and corrected me

That is a very “e-rude-ite” observation. And now that I have been listening to audiobooks more frequently it has been an absolute revelation. There are definitely still words I have continued to butcher.

Quiche=quickie

Ped ess TREE un

FUCKIN' HORS D'OEUVRES

“Invalid.”

"August."

I pronounce August and august differently

Ok that one got me right in the gut

hey!!!

I ordered a strawberry duhcwary* *daiquiri

I see it

HEY hey hey

Unfortunately I don't remember any of mine but two family expressions are courtesy of my daughter: fracas, pronounced "fra-cah" (she thought maybe it was French) and, my favorite, dubois, not as in Blanche but as in "I am very dubois about Cuomo's moral core"

How are you pronouncing fracas then?

In English you say the s, and most often hear it with a long a

No we don't.

You do in the US. Feel free to Google

I am not in the US!

I figured!

You said English. English is in England. We speak proper!

I've just looked it up. Apparently Americans say 'Fray- cass' That's objectively hilarious 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 😂 Americans. Wow. How to pronounce fracas UK/ˈfræk.ɑː/ US/ˈfreɪ.kəs/

Yep we murder the language no question

Me reading Lovecraft's biography in ninth grade and not noticing the third "i" in "nihilism," spending the year telling everyone I'm a nihlist.

I just felt so bad for you, in so much solidarity.

hey

Macabre crowd, rise up! I had just read Dickens when I first saw it (I know, le sigh) and thought it was like Macawber. BUT I saw it first as Danse Macabre and I can now say Makahb if the word is alone but Dance Macawber is etched in I am a librarian with a taste for horror, it gets me REGULARLY

For me it was ma-cob-ray

Mac-a-bray, sibling of Mac-ra-may.

This is how I say it in my head to this day.

Mackabree!

Macabree is also very good

Mack a burr

Grimoire for me, I say Grim-or-ree sometimes still and I'm in my 40's! 📖❤️

Yeah, Danse Macabree, into my 20’s…

In front of the whole class, "bowie knife", first syllable pronounced to rhyme with "how" "How" as in "how the fuck does everyone in the third grade except me know this"

Ah yes pronounced docile as dok-i-lee in my head for years til corrected (gently) by my big sister

Always getting into arguments with my partner about how to pronounce words because we were both these kids. Most recently, he won about the word "nacre," which I was sure had a short "a," but alas.

Darn!

Wait. It doesn't? 😂

you’re gonna wish you could unknow this but it’s pronounced like “acre”

Isn't that just horrifying???

offensive!

it’s like the opposite of onomatopoeia like “pulchritude”

My partner ALSO likes to rile me up by calling me pulchritudinous and then saying, "What, it's a compliment!"

What!? That just seems wrong

I still sometimes mentally pronounce "draught" as "drott". I also used to think "integer" was pronounced "in-TEE-gur".

Heyyyyy

Couldn’t say epitome but knew what it meant (so, verbal language confusion ensues when 8 year old me tries to use it…) And also (Thread): bsky.app/profile/stef...

Yo, from pec-u-liar.

Howdy from ass-part-uh-me (aspartame)

"chic". in 7th grade english class. reading to the whole class. all girls. for whom i was the new (weird) girl. i said "chick"! i didn't know! the room convulsed.

I used the word facade at the dinner table once and pronounced it “fa-kade”; my older sister laughed at me and said “oh, you’re so naive” - but pronounced it “nave”. The entire family burst into laughter, and to this day, we still say “you’re so nave!” 🤣

Oh hey it me

hell yeah

I remember my stepmother describing her experience of this to me as a teenager, when she and her sisters had “whodunit” mysteries, and thought it was pronounced “whad unit” 😂

👋 I even heard "albeit" being pronounced several times, but for some reason it took me far too long to connect that to the word I was reading and pronouncing in my head as "al-bite".

my silliest one was being very young and not parsing c’mon as a way to write ‘come on’ contracted and reading it like Simone, which i may have heard somewhere separately. i thought the apostrophe perhaps indicated exotic pronunciation somehow

Hey!

80s D&D nerd. I thought infrared was “in-frared” with two syllables.

YES. Obviously the past tense of infrare.

I learned "jalopy" from the Hardy Boys books and thought it was pronounced "JA-lop-ee" until I was in my tweens or so, because who on earth says "jalopy" any more?

nobody, apparently, which means I still don't know how to pronounce it! ... heh. So, hi..

I learned "jalopy" from the Hardy Boys 40 years ago and only today am learning I have the pronunciation wrong lol.

I remember learning this from a random song lyric by Harry Connick Jr. I was like 13 & really into rom coms. Don’t judge me.

It’s Chet who has a yellow jalopy, right? Anyway… is it just less emphasis on the first syllable? Or have I been messing it up more severely than that?

Accent is on the “lah.” I didn’t hear it aloud till I was an adult.

What???

ja·​lopy | \ jə-ˈlä-pē www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/j...

Thank goodness my dad (71) mostly showed me reruns of his childhood films. There's still a bunch of words I never heard, but if it was relevant to pop culture in the 1960s or early 1970s, I'm set.

(And shows, I do know better than to post this late, I swear.)

Um, me, too. Exactly the same source. 😂🤣

Did you know that they did a grimdark hardy boys in the 90s in which iola Morton gets killed in a terrorist bomb in the first book?

Yeah, and Frank Hardy and Callie Shaw shared some hot tub time. It was… very ‘90s.

Ooh, yep, that was one of mine too. From the same books, no less ( :

Jalopy is a word I know how to say but seldom see written. Older generations of my family have used it, passed it on through bizarre anecdotes of their childhood, etc. We've a strangely broad and archaic vocabulary even before you factor in my hyperlexia. Mithering is my favourite 'family' word.

Oh! Mithering is a word i use too! I dont know anyone else who does though

Apparently, it's a term from the north of England. My family is not from the North. Goodness knows where they've picked it up, but it's still common use across multiple generations. 🤷

Ahh, I am from the north of England but still, I dont really hear it, maybe from my mams generation?

Dude, I am past the half-century mark and thought that’s how it was pronounced until Right Now.

Crap now I have to go look it up

nobody says this word! ever!!

(Clouseau) “Newt Hwenymohre”

wait till you see where they think it originated

no way

language is just a long series of kludges, it's a miracle we can communicate at all

exactly! every word carries sediment of centuries of accidents, mishearings, trade routes. "jalopy" from jalapa is perfect - born from where broken cars ended up. language isn't designed, it's discovered through use, like worn paths through a forest.

Ha!

wat

Wait how do you say it?!?

wait what

I learned the word from my maternal grandfather, who used it to refer to a pedal car I had as a kid. So I already knew how to pronounce it when I encountered it in the Hardy Boys books. (Tangential to which, while walking along West Cliff in Santa Cruz earlier this evening, there was a guy driving a

Model T runabout with a 1924 plate on it and… that car is clearly a Work In Progress and could currently serve as the illustration in the dictionary for “jalopy”. It runs, though! (There was also a guy with a Model A, and eventually they both stopped at the lighthouse to chat.))

Wait.. how is it actually pronounced? I always heard it as "Ja LOP ee"

That is correct.

*raises hand* I still use this word. But then again, I'm ancient.

You too?!

One of the many reasons I will never forgive the French.

Re. epitome: high school advanced English class, reading aloud. Pronounced it eppy-tome, heard myself, flashed on all the other gifted nerds around me drawing breath to mock and correct, and immediately stopped, midsentence, to literally yell "EPITOME!" (correctly)

Until very recently, I thought "Various" was pronounced like "Varry-ous"

(pronouncing it heeay) hey

Jerry, no

H as in honor, e as the last letter of breathe and y as in beyond: “ “

Stop it, Jeeery.

I did a college presentation and said as-part-a-me. VERY embarrassing.

The Greek warrior hero!

Chalcedony here!

Still no idea how to say that one.

Cal said a knee

👋🏼👋🏼

swaydoh = pseudo

As a kid, I wanted to visit “YOSE-mite” park. Recently, I thought movies about real people were called “bi-OP-ics.”

I just learned less than a month ago that chalcedony isn't pronounced CHAL-suh-dough-knee, and I am not a young man.

You're ahead of me. I just learned that one right now.

Hey hey

Voice cracking because I literally just don't physically speak often: H- Hey

Segue! Scepter!

I still enjoy saying the "p" sound in all of the psych___ words. And skissors ✂️

Learn Greek, and you can say the 'p' with justification!

With you on segue and I'm blaming these idiots: Sigue Sigue Sputnik, pronounced Zeeg Zeeg Sputnik. Enjoy the image. Don't, for your sanity's sake, listen to the music.

I had heard segue for decades before I connected it to that spelling.

It still seems so strange to me!

hey

Also deciding that albeit was pronounced "all-bite" because it looked French (although I also didn't know how to pronounce words in French)

Pro-TEST-ant for the Christian group that wasn't Catholic. Unfortunately, I was also trying simultaneously to claim to be one, because being Unitarian was too complicated to explain. Oops.

misled. until adulthood that was pronounced “my-zulled” in me head, where I imagined “mis-lead” was a different word. they were functionally synonyms, but “misled” was more sketchy, a la swindled / bamboozled. for reference, I got a perfect score on the PSAT verbal.

THANK YOU. I thought I was the only one. It makes total sense right?

Oh man you do NOT want to know how I pronounced Persephone when I started reading Greek myths at age 8

My very Greek myth obssessed 6 year old kiddo read the word laminate as lam-i-not-ee and was convinced that laminate was a Greek goddess.

Ring ring! Percy Phone!

If I hadn't had a Greek mythology obsessed teacher in seventh grade, I'd still be saying Percy-pony.

Ferris-phone 😳

Now I want to read a gay My Little Pony fanfic starring Percy Pony where he's trapped in hell by the evil Haydz

"Chortle" checking in

plethORa like RemORa

Similarly my roommate reads patio like ratio.

check out The Three Amigos (1986) for a riff on that

Oi

hey

Where my Hyper-bowl Homies at?

Reporting for duty 🫡

to this day if there's a way to mispronounce a word I will find it

Man, I got roasted so hard over that

Present

It will always be hyperbowl to me...

I heard someone hyper-bowl on tv in the last two weeks. No lie.

👋

My mom told me a long time ago to never make fun of people who mispronounce words but use them correctly. It usually meant they were a reader and not someone who picked up the word in conversation. And they were usually a lot smarter than the person making fun or feeling the need to correct them

Yes!!!!!!

*Raises hand* "present."

👋🏻

Oh god for real It’s so bad I even say even common words weirdly

“Facetious” I knew how the spoken word sounded and what it meant but thought it was spelled differently. I thought the written word meant “bloviating” or something like that.

I'm in medicine literally none of us know how to pronounce any word we all just guess and acknowledge that we've read the words in all kinds of books but have never heard them pronounced with any consistency. Case in point, "tinnitus."

See also "duodenum"

"syncope"

Wait, I think I know SIN-co-pee (?), but I've never been sure about the intestinal one, and since tinnitus affects me I'm invested in… TIN-it-us?

That or tin-EYE-tus are acceptable as far as I'm concerned

What about… DWAH-d'num?

That's how I've always said it, but most of the GI docs I worked with pronounced it duo-DEEN-num.

I am not in medicine but have a strong feel that it should *not* be tin-Ni-tus even though the double n indicates that the second syllables starts with an n and it carries the stress.

Classic child of a nurse here, I’ve heard so many of them said in conversation but rarely read them 😅 couldn’t point them out in the wild but hear them and I’m transported back to my mum talking about work

My mom was a nurse midwife so I know exactly what you mean. There's a lot around the obstetrics world where I know the terms and probably some of it was covered in school, but most of my familiarity with them is from her talking about delivering babies.

Hey

I have completely surrendered and now point at “gyros” on the menu and tell the server “I’ll take these, however it’s pronounced.”

Got called out for my pronunciation of "eunuch" (e-uh-nuch) early on in my summer camp career

Heeey!! Added trauma: my mom would yell at me when I knew words she didn't know

Hey 🤓.

Hey so you know how the lands ruled by a count are a county? To me that always meant the lands ruled by a duke, i.e. a duchy, would be pronounced dookie. I was not corrected on this until my forties.

They should spell it dutchy!

Hey (pronounced 'hee-why')

~heeeey~

Gnome. I said “goom”

ep ih tome hey

Hey

Rick-ot-chett . When I first heard “ricochet”, I was staggered.

'paramour' (pronounced it correctly, misapplied it…) 'subtle' (the opposite of 'supertle')

I think I've said before that the feral wapiti is my nemesis in this respect. (I always thought that "feral" had a long "e" and the stress on "wapiti" was on the second syllable. Until I said the words where people could hear me.)

Me excitedly gushing about Paradox Paradujem to my friend and he's like... do you perhaps mean pair-a-dime? So I dug in and was like... paradiggems. It's been over a decade... one of my favorite conversations. Paradigm: Redefining paradigm as two shovels was a pairadiggems shift.

I was goofing around in Friday and said paradiggem. My French colleague was like "what English word have I been mispronouncing for years?!?!"

Hey 🙋‍♀️

Yep. Or how about having to search your mind for a simpler word when expressing a thought in conversation.

Was a teen before I learned it was “hap-hazard” not “haf-hazard”. Unfortunately the person who told me was a judge in a speech competition. I did not advance. 😬

And don’t ask about acidophilus.

Teacher in HS asked me how I was doing I said "I was full of en-u-eye" He responded. "That's ennui, you clown." He thought I was making a joke...I just didn't know how to pronounce it until that day...

I still pronounce eloquent wrong. The way I say eloquent sounds more eloquent, though.

It makes sense to put the emphasis in the same place you would for, say, loquacious, right?

you mean the em-FAR-sis?

It's alright for you lot. I've got a problem with spilling. 🤣

number of times ive been stared at as an adult...

👋 A few years ago I learned it was “con-COM-i-tunt” not “con-com-MIT-unt” and… yeah. I wonder how many of those words I still have kicking around my brain like ticking time bombs of future embarrassment?

Took me ages to realize how "awry" was pronounced.

Yes! I was looking for this. I still remember the day I heard my English teacher say it. The wonder!

Yes, “Currents turn awry” in Hamlet, was it that?

No - just talking to us about poetry. All casual and unaware of the fireworks that went off in my brain. I know my face was showing my delight, I just hope it didn’t raise her hopes for my poems…

Wonderful. I sometimes feel ashamed of my lack of other languages, but my multilingual friends have a unique, grudging esteem for English (beyond its ubiquity) because of experiences like yours

I still read it like awe-ree in my head even though I know better.

Curmudgeon

kaos not chaos

Yes exactly!

Epitome was Epi-tome Citadel rhymed with dreidel Wanna thank BG3 for teaching me how to pronounce Justiciar, not that I've ever had to say it.

👋🏻

Me: "I love how the wind disheveles my hair." Pronounced dis heaveles. Miss Davis, my 6th grade teacher, takes me aside. "It's pronounced dish-ev-els. I didn't want you to be embarrassed if you mispronounce it to someone else." Me: proceeds to be embarassed for the next 50 years.

Scrolling through the comments to see if that damnable word got anyone else and see I'm in good company

Hey!

Azee-lum (asylum)

At my school (Oakham), we were taught Latin from Forms 1 to 3 (yrs 7 to 9), and then continued at GCSE level. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Quietly became the ESL student largest vocabulary in my class 🥲 Definitely couldn’t pronounce good number of them

Ethereal was my downfall!

Demesne Visage

I still don't know how to pronounce demesne.

It's homophonous with domain. Which drives me mad, because I want to contrast the two words sometimes.

So, de-main?

Yeah, Dee-main or di-main (two different representations of what's meant to be the same pronunciation)

I say do-MAIN but the o is still there. I also pronounce mesne a little shorter than cake.

It’s duh-MAIN.

But it's English and the stress is on the second syllable so that first vowel - the only contrast between the words - undergoes reduction to a schwa. So in my normal speech, they are perfect homophones.

I still can't believe it's dee-TRY-tus. 🧐

Island. 'Is land.' I was only about 6 years old at the time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Good guess. Isthmus is like that.

Makes sense. An island is land.

"soporific"

I don't care that desultory is apparently supposed to be pronounced Dessel Tory (which sounds the protagonist of a Star Wars knockoff) and not de-SUL-tor-ee

Oh no! I got to be old and still didn’t know that!

I’ll stand by de-SUL-tor-ee.

That’s just the British versus American pronunciation.

Wait, really?? TIL

...TIL!

What?!?

The ones that still pain me the most are food-related, because I already hated ordering anything from anyone and these both made it worse. Ciabatta, as a senior in high school at a Big Boy restaurant. And linguica, ordering pizza in Massachusetts for the first time in my early 20s.

Mir-a-beel dictu!

I was the other side of 30 before I realised "all be it" and "albeit" were the same word.

Heeeeeey!

Hey

There is great honor in novel pronunciations of words one is only exposed to in books.

Hey! I heard "reader's accent" a few years ago and adopted it immediately. In other news I still don't know what color any of the fancy color words are (mauve? fuschia?) because you can't pick them up from context. (Researching this, I just learned there's a shade of pink called Lusty Gallant!)

Without context, mauve and chartreuse feel like they got switched at birth.

Fay-cade

Rode Amtrak with a dude who kept asking, “Is this portable water?” Attendant kept pointing out the cups. Guy finally yelled, “PORTABLE, you know, can you drink it?! Work on your vocabulary!” Me: “The word you want is potable.” Him: “SHUT UP.” I’d only just learned to say potable, not poe-table.

I blame Jeopardy! for that. It was always pronounced Potent Poe-tables

I didn't know how to pronounce apologia until I heard it in a YouTube video lol

Took me DECADES to finally read the brand name Titleist correctly. My brain saw it as TIT-ly-est instead of title-ist. Always thought is was such a strange choice of branding. 👀

🤭

Imagine my 4th grade teacher's face when in my report on an early plant biologist, I pronounced fuschia as "FUCK-see-ah" with a straight face and a lot of emphasis. I had no idea.

Sup

Awry was mine, always read it as "Aw-reee" instead of "a rye"

Yo. "Etiquette" pronounced Ee-tick-wi-tee - in front of my entire class.

I always read Macabre as "Ma-ka-bray", up till my teens

Self-taught IT nerd here, had to have a gf explain that Ethernet is pronounced eeethernet

Oh, god, I'm facepalming over here.

Also true for well read foreigners who only know some words as written.

Hors d’oeuvres; whores dove ress if you’re nasty.

Still! I’m 53 and I still have words rattling around my brain that I don’t know how to pronounce.

hello, fellow word nerds checking in with a "you are such an a-DOLE-eh-scent."

Detritus (formerly thought to rhyme with nutritious) says hey!

I do the thing where I use a word I recall from memory that I learned using context clues. Then I look it up. Sometimes the word was appropriate. The other times…..

If I birthed one of those kids can I say hey too?? Some of my favorite mom memories are rooted in this, BTW

Hey

Facade. I’m still chagrined over that one.

Samesies

I pronounced chagrin wrong for soooo long lol

Enn-you-i

Hey. Encompass pronounced income pass.

I learned about Beethoven reading Peanuts books. You can imagine how that went. Also whoa from Little House books.

“Awry” like “aw-ree”

Melancholy like “melon cully” (I had only ever heard it in French)

Ugh. And I still love a good word like that to date.

The day that I realized reading the word see-a-o was a person saying Ciao, a word I used knowing a little Italian from my grandparents but did not know how to spell and never connected to the actual spelling in print was a mind bender.

Now imagine if English is not your first language... 😅

Hey from past me who thought "scythe" was pronounced "sky-th"

I still struggle

hyperbole - as hyper-bowl. Like super-bowl, but more so.

Growing up, "Don Quixote" was the title of a volume of my parents' bookshelves, visible but never said out loud. "Donkey Hotey" was the donkey puppet on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. When a college lecturer pronounced the first as the second, I had no idea what he was talking about.

I remember my mother correcting “subtle” when I was young and that was pretty bad because I thought I was hot shit but the absolute worst was thinking that Keats was surely pronounced the same way as Yeats in freshman English class. 😖😖😖

🫡Hey! ‘Words You’ve Read But Not Heard Said’ is what I call this phenomenon, and it us always a badge of pride. It is also exposing in how others respond.

“Subterfuge” like it’s some foul tasting confection and “hegemony” as hedge-e-mony and I kinda blame Billy Idol for that one

"segue" was "seh-GEEW" until I was about 24. (For those who still don't know, it's pronounced like the motorized scooter thing "seg-way".)

I pronounced it “seeg” for far too long myself

I was a seeger too!

I read it as being 🇫🇷, and said seg (to rhyme with beg).

I first read that word in the liner notes of the Star Wars* soundtrack album, and pronounced it wrong forever… never heard it out loud. *back when this could only refer to one two-LP album.

never had seen or heard the name Hermione, so i only knew once Ron pronounced it phonetically to Krum lol. I was sayin 'ermee ahn' til then (sorry for jkr mention but yeah pronunciation) but also. i read the dictionary for fun as a kid. and encyclopedias. encarta was such a gooooooooooood upgrade.

Hey. 👋🏼

& the opposite! I had never seen “segue” written anywhere, only heard it, so was convinced it was segway. Then the scooter thing came and confirmed it (to me.) Seeing it in text for the first time was like being told I was adopted.

Only recently learned that “respite” is RES-PIT and not RE-SPITE. The latter feels better, like re-lax in your re-spite.

Re-spite is British English, and pronounced that way in many countries, e.g. Australia and NZ. I’ve never heard it said the other way.

Regional variation?

Thank you for telling me this! I feel vindicated!!

Hey.

mizzled instead of miss-led Stupid spelling of misled.

The first time I ever used the word epitome.

"Grand prix". Whoo did I get laughed at by the boys in school :(

I learned that “Segue” is “segway” not “seegh” from a Reddit thread on words you didn’t know you pronounced wrong.

“See-gyoo”. 😭

Calliope syndrome, yea, hey.

It’s just not fair that the muse and the instrument are pronounced differently.

Wait, what? 😊

Haha heeey

YO!

Cacophony

It's "Tah-gaa-luhg" not "Tag-a-log" for me.

Hey, yup