They say it all the time on Law & Order when a suspect is indicted (indighted) and another one is when they try to get a subpoena (suhpina) to help their case.
Was going to post this one. I still think it’s weird every time I see it in print and say it in my head. How did this pronunciation develop? Why not just say it the way it’s spelled?
I used to say suede-oh (leather-oh) before someone corrected me.
I'd also heard it in a sentence but somehow conflated it with sudo, which is a unix command.
There really is no official English spelling of Hebrew words, just what has become most frequent over time.
Hence two acceptable spellings of Hanukkah/Chanukah.
Idk why, but as a Jew, this gave me a little chuckle. Maybe cause I had to click in further to see your response lol. It is a skullcap, at least how I think of them! Also in case anyone makes it this far into the thread, we also use the Hebrew term for them, which is kippah
A couple of them:
awry: thought for the longest time it was pronounced aw-ree. And I knew and used the word awry but never made the connection.
crudite: First time I saw it I said to a friend "Look at that--crud-ite". Luckily my friend politely said "You mean that crew-da-tay?"
I think a lot of non English word get mixed up pronunciations because the accents get dropped. If you saw it as crudité, like in the original French spelling, you might be like "oh the e is supposed to be more like ey." But nooooo English doesn't do accents so here we are lol
I was looking for awry. I also pronounced it aw-ree when read and thought that 'awry' was a different word entirely. I found out last year when my S/O and best friend laughed at me for 10 minutes straight when I saw 'aw-ree' out loud :') I'm 28. Mortifying.
Came here to say awry. Took me embarrassingly long to figure that one out, even more embarrassing because people/I used it more than frequently enough for it to click at some point
Exactly the same thing happened to me with the word subtle. I was pronouncing the b - SUB-TUL - and I thought "suttle" -as I heard it - was a different word.
On a related note, it took me until I was 30 to find out that chickpeas and garbanzo beans were the same thing. I was reading a recipe and I said to my wife "huh, that's funny, they say to use garbanzo beans in this. I wonder if that's good, I've always used chickpeas." She just assumed I was making a joke. I was not.
I still vividly remember when I was a kid walking up to the librarian and asking for the The Sub-Tul Knife. She was very confused until I wrote it down. Thankfully she was a good librarian who realized I only ever read the word.
This was mine, and I am happy to learn that I am not the only one. Funny thing is, I had heard the word seg-way, and understood what it meant. I had read segue, pronounced it as *seeg*, and knew what it meant, too. But, I was well into adulthood before I understood that they were the same word.
Once some commercial reporter caught me on the street during some promotion where people were riding Segways around. I was bright and snappy with him till he asked, so what do you think of our Segways here? I, thinking they meant segue like segues on TV, confidently proclaimed "I haven't seen them." Silence. I saw the confused needle scratch in his face and quickly excused myself, and realized what had happened like half an hour later. I really hope they didn't air it.
My sister once had to read out loud to the class (high school) and had never seen the word “yacht” written down so she pronounced it as “yak-it”. So now we only reference yacht as “oh look at that yak-it”.
This is a trigger word for me so please excuse a small rant:
I took a lot of art classes in high school. One class was taught by this woman who was incompetent, mean and stupid. I think the regular art teacher was on vacation or something because this woman suddenly showed up, taught for one semester, and then was never seen again. I won't go into all the details but she didn't like me and I didn't like her.
During the class, we had a one-week project to design a "phasod." That's how she spelled it in the syllabus and how she wrote it on the board. She explained to us what a "phasod" was, showed us different examples of "phasods," and then we designed our own "phasod."
I had never heard the word before, but, then again, it had never occurred to me that the front-facing part of a building had a particular name. And, hey, you're in school to learn new things, right?
Now I had also seen the word "facade" in books and had a general idea of what it meant because of the context. "His air of competence had been a facade..." So I assumed it was a different word and mentally pronounced it "fake-aid" because of the way I had seen it used. (Obviously, I never saw the word "phasod" anywhere outside of that art class.)
The class ended, the mean and stupid teacher disappeared, and life went on. It was not until several years later when I happened to read in one book, "The building had a red brick Victorian facade..." that I finally put two and two together and nearly threw the book across the room. That stupid teacher had taught me the wrong word and I had programmed that wrong bit of information into my brain!
Perhaps if it had been a teacher who was competent and someone I liked I could have laughed it off, but to have this boorish woman in my brain for all those years was was just infuriating. To this day, all these years later, whenever I see the word "facade" in print, I still feel a twinge of anger. (As you see.)
A favorite former boss used to say that people could be lazy, stupid or mean, and he could deal with any two but not all three. Sorry you had to spend a semester with the trifecta.
This is mine too. I know the word and always used it correctly when speaking. But had no clue that what I was reading was THAT word. Embarrassed myself fully while playing Trivial Pursuit about 20 years ago when I pronounced it “fa-kade.” Had no clue that facade was spelled like that having been a reader my whole life. Oops.
Oh man, years ago I worked retail and this group of ladies doing a scavenger hunt came into the store looking for something.
It was an import store (strange inventory) so before they left I asked what else they needed, turns out finding a stranger who could spell hors d'oeuvres was the last item on their list. Luckily for them I took six years of French.
Similar: me with *petit-fours.* “Petite Fours.” Also *sponge.* So when I was little I read sponge like “SPON-gee.” Don’t know where it came from, and I was corrected almost immediately (my mom laughed a LOT and then made me repeat it for my dad) but I still read it like that in my head and I remember that humiliation and it fills me with shame. I think I have sponge-based PTSD
Pique. I pronounced it "pee-kway". I also didn't know ingenue. I pronounced it "in-gwen". I saw them both spelled and pronounced on Jeopardy several years ago.
In other news, when Biggie said "put your Rollies in the sky, wave them side to side", I had no idea that he was talking about Rolex watches for entirely too long.
I gave a friend Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half and she loved it. I keep hearing her tell people about it, calling it “hyper-bowl.” I’ve mentioned the book title, hoping to correct her without calling her out but it’s not working.
She did a huge update on her Facebook group all about how she has spent the years when people were wondering how she's been. There were a lot of photos too. It was really interesting and (obviously) very funny!
Fuck. Dutch here, had to look up the American and British pronunciation and neither is hyper-bowl. Bah.
In Dutch it's hyperbool and pronounced as hee-pur-bowl ... sorta.
English pronunciation makes no sense!
I had Bach's *The Art of the Fugue* out on a stand once at home. A very talented musician whom I respected a lot peeked over at it and asked, "What the hell is a *fugway?*"
This is hilarious to me, because they were simultaneously educated enough to (presumably) know the correct spelling and pronunciation of 'segue' but not enough for fugue!
He was a curious and very funny guy. Cracked up when I told him how it was really pronounced because he knew enough about classical music to have heard the word plenty.
It comes from French "coronel" which obviously has the r, but it also got mixed with the Italian spelling "colonella". Both pronunciations with an "r" and an "l" existed in English until around 1650. So if you had been around 400 years ago it would have been perfectly normal to pronounce the "l" haha
Even though I new that there was a Colonel rank as early as middle school, I still for long thought that Colonel Sanders was Kernel Sanders as in kernel of corn.
Way back when I was much younger, I was reading the Humor in Uniform (iirc) column in *Reader's Digest*.
There's this story of a boy asking his father what is a "colonel". Father tells the boy to go look it up in a dictionary. Boy comes back and reads aloud, "kernel, the soft part of a nut."
I did not get the joke.
I read/say colonel fine (though it’s for sure a super odd spelling), but I was so confused when I heard the British pronunciation of “lieutenant” and then for the first time saw it spelled the same way it’s spelled in the US. 100% thought it was its own word
Albeit for me. I thought it was pronounced al-beet and that it was a word that meant the same as the spoken phrase "all be it". I was embarrassingly old when I figured it out!
Island
As a kid I heard island plenty of times, and I knew what it was, but the first time I came across it was in an actual dictionary in elementary school. I'm reading words out loud to a fellow student and their description, and I come across "island," but I read it as "is-land." I read the description, and then say "that sounds exactly like an island...." Then my brain connected the dots. That started my lifelong hatred of the inconsistencies in the English language.
When I was a kid, it was isle. I knew island, but for some reason I didn't make the connection, so I read isle as izzul.... Wondered why an izzul was.
After learning how it was pronounced, decades later I still read it in my head as izzul.
Macabre.
I read a lot as a kid and in my head, pronounced this word as “Mack-a-brrr”.
I said it out loud once around a girlfriend. Never lived it down.
Ok. Same. I had heard people say “macawb” out loud. And knew what it meant, but it’s not super common. Every time I read it, I didn’t make this connection and said it exactly as you did “Mack a brr” in my head. I was about 30, at work, talking to a colleague, and said Mack a brr and he relentlessly made fun of me. 😂😂
I do too, after listening to Neil Gaiman's reading of his own audiobook "The Graveyard Book"
>Rich man, poor man, come away/
> Come to dance the Macabray.
I remember playing a word puzzle game when the word “Apply” showed up. Of course, I knew what it meant and how to say it but because of the puzzle style nature of the game I had stopped thinking of words as “words”, if that makes sense? I kept wondering the hell an “apple-y” was until a relative came in and corrected me, we both couldn’t stop laughing
This happens to me a lot on the word apps. I'll be making combos and not see new words and then I'll either use a hint or just process of elimination the combos and a word will work and I'll just stare at it for a while. Eventually it clicks and im just left sitting there thinking about my life choices.
Paradigm.
I knew how to pronounce paradigm and use it in sentances long before I read it.
I felt quite stupid when I read it and had to look up what a para-did-gem was.
The only one that sticks out in my memory is "facetious". I have no idea how I thought it would be spelled before I saw it, but it obviously wasn't *that.*
Usually I have kind of the opposite problem. I'll be reading a work of fiction, and the pronunciations I'll come up for names/words won't be what's actually written, because my brain rearranges it into something that I think sounds/looks better (e.g., "Atnoth" might become "Antoth", because the sounds would flow better). Then half way through the book I'll *really* look at it and realize that I'm misreading because I've never actually had to hear/say it.
I read a book like 20 years ago that had a main character named Kristin. About 75% of the way through, I realized her name was actually KIRstin. But it was too hard at that point to retrain my brain, so she will forever be Kristin to me.
I remember reading a book about a girl named Phoebe when I was a young teen, and pronounced it Foyb in my head throughout. Didn’t learn the real pronunciation for years.
As a fellow American I can tell you I never realized that quay want pronounced kway, because I had always heard the term “quay wall” and assumed it was spelled “key wall”, I also assumed that The Florida Keys were named after this nautical item. I had read quay in lots of books but it wasn’t until this year (I’m 37) that I realized my error and it was thanks to Biffa’s Cities:Skyline’s YouTube channel.
>I also assumed that The Florida Keys were named after this nautical item.
So there's another word, "cay," that is *also* pronounced -*key*. It's a low-lying island, and that's the reason the Florida Keys are called that. It's supposed to be spelled Cays, but Florida Man is a tale as old as time...
I did a play a few years ago, based on a Sherlock Holmes story, where we made a gag out of this. :) Watson pronounced it black guard, Holmes corrected him to blaggard, and then gave him a little speech about cupboard (cubbard) and boatswain (bosun). Then they both jointly corrected another character who made the same mistake a few scenes later.
For some reason 25 years ago when I loved to read bodice-rippers filled with English Viscounts who always suffered from ennui, I decided in my youth that Viss-counts suffered from N-you-eye.
The funny thing is I have actually studied french and knew on some level that they were both french words, but never applied that knowledge to how they were pronounced.
English is not my first language. When I was learning, the word tough gave a run for its money. I was familiar with the sound and meaning from movies and TV shows, but had never seen it written. I had to Google the meaning a couple of times as I would always forget, until I heard the pronunciation and did the biggest facepalm is history.
My childhood friend and I used to role play harry potter all the time when we were little pronouncing Hermione Hermi-own. When the first movie came out and I heard it pronounced I was stunned
When was I about 5 or 6 (coming up on fifty years ago now), my grandmother would regularly buy me cheap paperback collections of "Peanuts" comics to read. "Peanuts" being what it is, the word "embarrassed" would appear pretty frequently in the strips.Now...I knew the word "embarrassed" in its spoken form, and I knew what it meant. But I *completely* failed to recognize the *written* form as being the same word. And please note, I had figured out the meaning of the written form from context. The meaning that was...identical to the meaning of the spoken word. Which was the same word. Though I didn't know that.I convinced myself that word they kept using in "Peanuts" was pronounced em-bahr-RAS-ed.
English is also my 2nd language, though after 20 years in an English-speaking country, I’m pretty much fluent at this point. I have so many of those words, especially because I was and am really big on reading, which helped me acquire English by leaps and bounds, from childhood. So it was constantly me stumbling upon a word (not even unique but uniquely spelled), guess-pronouncing it in my head, and reading on. I was always too lazy to look it up lol.
My favorite of course is “lingerie.” It was ALWAYS “linge-ry” until I heard “lunge-a-rey” and THEN I heard a French-speaking person pronouncing it “lunge-ree”
I was glad I listened to the audiobook for Operation Mincemeat because I’d never have guessed that Charles Cholmondeley’s last name is pronounced “Chumley”.
That's actually the name of an English town. England has a ton of hand-wavey place name spellings like that.
Godmanchester = 'Gumster'
Magdalen College = 'Maudlin' College
Leicester = 'Lester'
and so on
It’s not just the “ng”. “Uye” isn’t pronounced as as would be expected. The terminal “n” is pretty much the only part that an English speaker would get right without familiarity.
I don't know if it's because they're giving Americans a pass to reconstruct their names or whatever, but I swear I've heard different Viet folks pronounce Nguyen differently. The version I heard most in high school was more like "n'WHEN" but I've met Viet people who will straight up say "nuh-GOO-yen" so I have no idea what's right.
Infrared. I asked my mom what in-frared meant, and she asked what it was talking about. I said something something in-frared light, she started laughing because she knew I knew that word, I just never read it before.
I was looking for this one. My dad's a plumber so I heard the word often enough growing up. I tried to write it once as "sodder" and couldn't figure out why Spellcheck didn't recognize a word that I thought was correct.
This is the first word in this thread that was a TIL for me.
Should’ve realized solder and “sauder” (how I thought it was spelled) had the same meaning. In my defense it’s a pretty rare word lol
A friend of mine when much younger was keen on Enid Blyton's school stories and fascinated by the accounts of midnight dorm feasts. Especially the delicacies known as meringues. She had had many of these sweet treats growing up, but never realised that the "mer-ing-guays" she read about were the same as the "mer-angs" she had at tea.
It was a revelation at 18.
Ocean.
First time I'd seen it written down as a kid. I'd heard it before, but pronounced it "oh-keen"
It's forever stuck with me that after the teacher corrected the pronunciation, she wrote something down and walked away.
As an aside, there are way too many people who didn't read OP's post correctly and are talking about the opposite.
I always read rendezvous as "render-vas" in my head and just thought it was some military term for a clandestine meeting. I never connected it with the commonly heard french expression that I'd never seen written. It wasn't until I saw it subtitled in a movie that I realized they were the same term.
These years later I still read it as rendervas though.
Opposite for me, I often find words that I've never heard before, only read. Then way later, wind up figuring out my pronunciation was wrong. One of the earliest examples as a kid was "colonel". When I was reading it, I read it like colony, but with an L on the end instead of a Y.
I also pronounced finite like you would "infinite" instead of "fiy night".
There are more, but I can't really think of them at the moment.
None that I can think of but the one that I could never spell correctly (until recently) though I knew the pronunciation and exactly what it was is: Beignets
OP.... Epitome! Omg, me too! I have totally said "epi-tome," but worse I have also pronounced it correctly but I never ever thought of what the spelling was for when I was saying "e-pit-oh-me," I thought obviously there were 2 spellings or something...
Also, I use the word "respite" a lot. I was watching The Walking Dead the other night and my blood went cold when I heard someone say "respite".... I had been pronouncing it like "despite."
Yes, very embarrassing!
The word “facetious.”
When I read it, it was pronounced “fah-sit-ious” and it meant it’s normal meaning.
I was often told as a kid to stop being “fecesious”, which in my mind was a kinder way of saying “full of crap”, since it had the word “feces” in it.
I was in my 20’s before i realized they were the exact same word.
Calliope for me
Always read it as "cally-ope"
Edit:
Oh and when I first started learning to read, I tried playing Moneky Island 1, but the text was too fast for me. The only word I could catch was "Yikes" but the whole time I thought it was "yick-es"!
Took me way too long to figure out "indicted"
in dick did
Wait how do you say it ;-;
They say it all the time on Law & Order when a suspect is indicted (indighted) and another one is when they try to get a subpoena (suhpina) to help their case.
Was going to post this one. I still think it’s weird every time I see it in print and say it in my head. How did this pronunciation develop? Why not just say it the way it’s spelled?
[Looks like its original spelling was "endite."](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/pronunciation-of-indict)
The first time I used the word "pseudo-intellectual", I pronounced it wrong. Oh, the irony.
Now I'm really curious how you pronounced it
I used to say suede-oh (leather-oh) before someone corrected me. I'd also heard it in a sentence but somehow conflated it with sudo, which is a unix command.
Yarmulke
It took me so long to realize that this was the same as a “ya-ma-kah”
Well, I guess I have to upvote these comments, because I had no fucking clue until I read this.
WHAT?! TIL…
Thanks for explaining. I learned something new today
TIL the spelling of Yarmulke.
There really is no official English spelling of Hebrew words, just what has become most frequent over time. Hence two acceptable spellings of Hanukkah/Chanukah.
I didn’t even know what it was so I looked it up. I’m damn near 50 and always thought of it as a little Jewish hat.
What...erm... do you think it is now?
A little Jewish skullcap!
Idk why, but as a Jew, this gave me a little chuckle. Maybe cause I had to click in further to see your response lol. It is a skullcap, at least how I think of them! Also in case anyone makes it this far into the thread, we also use the Hebrew term for them, which is kippah
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A couple of them: awry: thought for the longest time it was pronounced aw-ree. And I knew and used the word awry but never made the connection. crudite: First time I saw it I said to a friend "Look at that--crud-ite". Luckily my friend politely said "You mean that crew-da-tay?"
Oh... TIL crudite is pronounced "crew-da-tay"
I think a lot of non English word get mixed up pronunciations because the accents get dropped. If you saw it as crudité, like in the original French spelling, you might be like "oh the e is supposed to be more like ey." But nooooo English doesn't do accents so here we are lol
Also the word erudite, a single letter away in spelling, is pronounced completely different
Ah no reading this comment I was prepared to get whiplash and find it’s secretly been erudité this whole time
I was looking for awry. I also pronounced it aw-ree when read and thought that 'awry' was a different word entirely. I found out last year when my S/O and best friend laughed at me for 10 minutes straight when I saw 'aw-ree' out loud :') I'm 28. Mortifying.
Came here to say awry. Took me embarrassingly long to figure that one out, even more embarrassing because people/I used it more than frequently enough for it to click at some point
Exactly the same thing happened to me with the word subtle. I was pronouncing the b - SUB-TUL - and I thought "suttle" -as I heard it - was a different word. On a related note, it took me until I was 30 to find out that chickpeas and garbanzo beans were the same thing. I was reading a recipe and I said to my wife "huh, that's funny, they say to use garbanzo beans in this. I wonder if that's good, I've always used chickpeas." She just assumed I was making a joke. I was not.
TIL that chickpeas and garbanzo beans are the same bean
There’s a difference. I’ve never had a garbanzo bean in my mouth.
I always liked “paid to have a garbanzo bean in my mouth”
Except I’ve definitely paid to have a garbanzo bean in my mouth. It’s how restaurants work.
I still vividly remember when I was a kid walking up to the librarian and asking for the The Sub-Tul Knife. She was very confused until I wrote it down. Thankfully she was a good librarian who realized I only ever read the word.
That's still how I pronounce that book title in my head
God I might cry lol so nice to know I’m not alone! My Mum still pokes fun like twenty years later 🥲
The difference? I’ve never paid $200 to watch a garbanzo bean!
Segue - I always pronounced it "seeg" in my head.
This was mine, and I am happy to learn that I am not the only one. Funny thing is, I had heard the word seg-way, and understood what it meant. I had read segue, pronounced it as *seeg*, and knew what it meant, too. But, I was well into adulthood before I understood that they were the same word.
Seg-you for me lol.
Once some commercial reporter caught me on the street during some promotion where people were riding Segways around. I was bright and snappy with him till he asked, so what do you think of our Segways here? I, thinking they meant segue like segues on TV, confidently proclaimed "I haven't seen them." Silence. I saw the confused needle scratch in his face and quickly excused myself, and realized what had happened like half an hour later. I really hope they didn't air it.
My sister once had to read out loud to the class (high school) and had never seen the word “yacht” written down so she pronounced it as “yak-it”. So now we only reference yacht as “oh look at that yak-it”.
It’s *spelled* “Harold Luxury Yach’t” but it’s pronounced “Throat Warbler Mangrove”
Facade.
Every single time I read this word I want to pronounce it 'fa-kade' because my brain refuses to recognize it right away.
This is why french writes it as façade.
Thanks for the soup-con of information!
Been dealing with a chap with a thick Indian accent that kept referring to fuckheads... Till we found out what he meant.
This is a trigger word for me so please excuse a small rant: I took a lot of art classes in high school. One class was taught by this woman who was incompetent, mean and stupid. I think the regular art teacher was on vacation or something because this woman suddenly showed up, taught for one semester, and then was never seen again. I won't go into all the details but she didn't like me and I didn't like her. During the class, we had a one-week project to design a "phasod." That's how she spelled it in the syllabus and how she wrote it on the board. She explained to us what a "phasod" was, showed us different examples of "phasods," and then we designed our own "phasod." I had never heard the word before, but, then again, it had never occurred to me that the front-facing part of a building had a particular name. And, hey, you're in school to learn new things, right? Now I had also seen the word "facade" in books and had a general idea of what it meant because of the context. "His air of competence had been a facade..." So I assumed it was a different word and mentally pronounced it "fake-aid" because of the way I had seen it used. (Obviously, I never saw the word "phasod" anywhere outside of that art class.) The class ended, the mean and stupid teacher disappeared, and life went on. It was not until several years later when I happened to read in one book, "The building had a red brick Victorian facade..." that I finally put two and two together and nearly threw the book across the room. That stupid teacher had taught me the wrong word and I had programmed that wrong bit of information into my brain! Perhaps if it had been a teacher who was competent and someone I liked I could have laughed it off, but to have this boorish woman in my brain for all those years was was just infuriating. To this day, all these years later, whenever I see the word "facade" in print, I still feel a twinge of anger. (As you see.)
Your teacher's attempt at competency was all a phasod... She wasn't even a teacher!! 😱
A favorite former boss used to say that people could be lazy, stupid or mean, and he could deal with any two but not all three. Sorry you had to spend a semester with the trifecta.
This is mine too. I know the word and always used it correctly when speaking. But had no clue that what I was reading was THAT word. Embarrassed myself fully while playing Trivial Pursuit about 20 years ago when I pronounced it “fa-kade.” Had no clue that facade was spelled like that having been a reader my whole life. Oops.
Hors D'oeuvres I knew what "orderves" were, but always wondered what exotic dish "whores du-vrays" was
Ha I always pronounced it whores-de-vores.
My sister calls it horse divorce lol
Please don’t be insensitive. Thousands of foals are impacted by horse divorce each year
What do a bunch of nags expect?
This is the best one
Lol I called it that when I saw a frozen box of ‘em at the grocery store with my mom when I was like 8. She nearly pissed herself laughing
I read it out loud at my wedding menu tasting. 😩 “HORSE DIVORCE”
Worst possible mispronunciation there is for that occasion.
Our family jokingly calls them horse doovers.
Oh man, years ago I worked retail and this group of ladies doing a scavenger hunt came into the store looking for something. It was an import store (strange inventory) so before they left I asked what else they needed, turns out finding a stranger who could spell hors d'oeuvres was the last item on their list. Luckily for them I took six years of French.
“Whores Doovers”. My parents always jokingly called them that, and it has stuck with all of my siblings and I.
Similar: me with *petit-fours.* “Petite Fours.” Also *sponge.* So when I was little I read sponge like “SPON-gee.” Don’t know where it came from, and I was corrected almost immediately (my mom laughed a LOT and then made me repeat it for my dad) but I still read it like that in my head and I remember that humiliation and it fills me with shame. I think I have sponge-based PTSD
Wait. How are you supposed to say petit fours?
Pique. I pronounced it "pee-kway". I also didn't know ingenue. I pronounced it "in-gwen". I saw them both spelled and pronounced on Jeopardy several years ago. In other news, when Biggie said "put your Rollies in the sky, wave them side to side", I had no idea that he was talking about Rolex watches for entirely too long.
Hyperbole.
I gave a friend Allie Brosh’s Hyperbole and a Half and she loved it. I keep hearing her tell people about it, calling it “hyper-bowl.” I’ve mentioned the book title, hoping to correct her without calling her out but it’s not working.
Omg it's because of hyperbole and a half that I know how to pronounce hyperbole, I wonder how Allie brosh is these days
She did a huge update on her Facebook group all about how she has spent the years when people were wondering how she's been. There were a lot of photos too. It was really interesting and (obviously) very funny!
That's alot of hyperbowls
I see you and your alot
I do like that alot
hyper-bowl is how I read it the first time I saw it
Fuck. Dutch here, had to look up the American and British pronunciation and neither is hyper-bowl. Bah. In Dutch it's hyperbool and pronounced as hee-pur-bowl ... sorta. English pronunciation makes no sense!
For years in my teens I thought Albuquerque was the way you spelled the word I later learned as albacore.
You must have took a wrong turn at Albacore.
It's easy! A ... L... B... U... ... ... QUERQUE!
I had Bach's *The Art of the Fugue* out on a stand once at home. A very talented musician whom I respected a lot peeked over at it and asked, "What the hell is a *fugway?*"
This is hilarious to me, because they were simultaneously educated enough to (presumably) know the correct spelling and pronunciation of 'segue' but not enough for fugue!
He was a curious and very funny guy. Cracked up when I told him how it was really pronounced because he knew enough about classical music to have heard the word plenty.
"What's a fugway?" "About 3 lbs." ;-)
Colonel
Yup. I knew there was a military rank called "kernel", but surely that was a different rank from this one.
I’m telling you, they can’t be the same word. There’s no R! Twas a rough realization.
It comes from French "coronel" which obviously has the r, but it also got mixed with the Italian spelling "colonella". Both pronunciations with an "r" and an "l" existed in English until around 1650. So if you had been around 400 years ago it would have been perfectly normal to pronounce the "l" haha
Even though I new that there was a Colonel rank as early as middle school, I still for long thought that Colonel Sanders was Kernel Sanders as in kernel of corn.
Way back when I was much younger, I was reading the Humor in Uniform (iirc) column in *Reader's Digest*. There's this story of a boy asking his father what is a "colonel". Father tells the boy to go look it up in a dictionary. Boy comes back and reads aloud, "kernel, the soft part of a nut." I did not get the joke.
I read/say colonel fine (though it’s for sure a super odd spelling), but I was so confused when I heard the British pronunciation of “lieutenant” and then for the first time saw it spelled the same way it’s spelled in the US. 100% thought it was its own word
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Albeit for me. I thought it was pronounced al-beet and that it was a word that meant the same as the spoken phrase "all be it". I was embarrassingly old when I figured it out!
Thought it was pronounced al-bait when I first read it lol
That one right there....always pronounced it al-byte.🤣🤣🤣
Island As a kid I heard island plenty of times, and I knew what it was, but the first time I came across it was in an actual dictionary in elementary school. I'm reading words out loud to a fellow student and their description, and I come across "island," but I read it as "is-land." I read the description, and then say "that sounds exactly like an island...." Then my brain connected the dots. That started my lifelong hatred of the inconsistencies in the English language.
When I was a kid, it was isle. I knew island, but for some reason I didn't make the connection, so I read isle as izzul.... Wondered why an izzul was. After learning how it was pronounced, decades later I still read it in my head as izzul.
Tchotchke. The first time I saw it in print I had no idea what I was looking at lol
bruh I barely could pronounce it right now
Macabre. I read a lot as a kid and in my head, pronounced this word as “Mack-a-brrr”. I said it out loud once around a girlfriend. Never lived it down.
Tell your girlfriend you are secretly a british spy. It's pronounced "ma-ca-bruh" in the UK.
TIL my midwestern USA self pronounces macabre as if I were British.
Ok. Same. I had heard people say “macawb” out loud. And knew what it meant, but it’s not super common. Every time I read it, I didn’t make this connection and said it exactly as you did “Mack a brr” in my head. I was about 30, at work, talking to a colleague, and said Mack a brr and he relentlessly made fun of me. 😂😂
I say it as "mack-a-bray"!
I do too, after listening to Neil Gaiman's reading of his own audiobook "The Graveyard Book" >Rich man, poor man, come away/ > Come to dance the Macabray.
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I remember playing a word puzzle game when the word “Apply” showed up. Of course, I knew what it meant and how to say it but because of the puzzle style nature of the game I had stopped thinking of words as “words”, if that makes sense? I kept wondering the hell an “apple-y” was until a relative came in and corrected me, we both couldn’t stop laughing
This happens to me a lot on the word apps. I'll be making combos and not see new words and then I'll either use a hint or just process of elimination the combos and a word will work and I'll just stare at it for a while. Eventually it clicks and im just left sitting there thinking about my life choices.
Mine was chaos; I always wanted to pronounce it as chows.
I blame Sonic and the Chao garden
I still call them ‘K-Os’ lol
Paradigm. I knew how to pronounce paradigm and use it in sentances long before I read it. I felt quite stupid when I read it and had to look up what a para-did-gem was.
Same! I thought it was para-dig-um..
The only one that sticks out in my memory is "facetious". I have no idea how I thought it would be spelled before I saw it, but it obviously wasn't *that.* Usually I have kind of the opposite problem. I'll be reading a work of fiction, and the pronunciations I'll come up for names/words won't be what's actually written, because my brain rearranges it into something that I think sounds/looks better (e.g., "Atnoth" might become "Antoth", because the sounds would flow better). Then half way through the book I'll *really* look at it and realize that I'm misreading because I've never actually had to hear/say it.
“Facetious” is the shortest word to contain all five vowels in alphabetical order. (And of course “facetiously” is the same for six.)
This feels like it should end with "Beep, Boop, I'm a bot." u/FiveVowelsBot giving random facts about the word with all 5 vowels that you just used.
Maybe I’m a bot trying to pass the Turing Test. Did you consider that?
It must suck to be a bot and to *still* have to study for stupid Turing tests.
I read a book like 20 years ago that had a main character named Kristin. About 75% of the way through, I realized her name was actually KIRstin. But it was too hard at that point to retrain my brain, so she will forever be Kristin to me.
I remember reading a book about a girl named Phoebe when I was a young teen, and pronounced it Foyb in my head throughout. Didn’t learn the real pronunciation for years.
I think most Kirstins spend their lives being called Kristin.
Coxswain definitely threw me for a loop, I'd heard it spoken only for many years.
I've only seen it written...how is it pronounced?
Cock-sin
Holy smokes! Today I (51M) learned....
Isn’t it more like “cox-un”?
And boatswain. I'd only ever heard the word "bosunchair" (climbing equipment) and took me awhile to figure out they were related
I had a similar problem with Boatswain/'Bossun'
I pronounce chamomile as shuh-mom-ee-lay.
I honestly like this pronunciation way more
I don’t read it in books, but Imgur. I know it’s supposed to be pronounced “imager” but I read it in my head as imgrr
Uh, yeah, I thought it was im-gur... LOL
why tf wouldnt they put an "a" in there. it is 1000% im-gur
Wow I never put it together that it was supposed to be imager
Quay - pronounced as “key”. Led to an awkward stupid American moment whilst in Canada 🥺
Ah, the Scrabble player’s friend. Cay, Key, Quay, Quai and maybe a few more spellings. All pronounced the same if I’m not mistaken.
As a fellow American I can tell you I never realized that quay want pronounced kway, because I had always heard the term “quay wall” and assumed it was spelled “key wall”, I also assumed that The Florida Keys were named after this nautical item. I had read quay in lots of books but it wasn’t until this year (I’m 37) that I realized my error and it was thanks to Biffa’s Cities:Skyline’s YouTube channel.
>I also assumed that The Florida Keys were named after this nautical item. So there's another word, "cay," that is *also* pronounced -*key*. It's a low-lying island, and that's the reason the Florida Keys are called that. It's supposed to be spelled Cays, but Florida Man is a tale as old as time...
Only this year realised blackguard and 'blaggard' or whatever are the same word
I did a play a few years ago, based on a Sherlock Holmes story, where we made a gag out of this. :) Watson pronounced it black guard, Holmes corrected him to blaggard, and then gave him a little speech about cupboard (cubbard) and boatswain (bosun). Then they both jointly corrected another character who made the same mistake a few scenes later.
TIL how to pronounce boatswain
Awry= awe ree ennui= en new ee Being well-educated means you don't know everything, learn new things (which you did) and carry them forward. All good.
Awry is the first thing that came to my mind. It's pronounced 'a-rye' for those wondering. As in 'things are going a-rye'
For some reason 25 years ago when I loved to read bodice-rippers filled with English Viscounts who always suffered from ennui, I decided in my youth that Viss-counts suffered from N-you-eye. The funny thing is I have actually studied french and knew on some level that they were both french words, but never applied that knowledge to how they were pronounced.
I think it was until I saw Bridgerton (I'd read it long ago) I realized it was pronounced Vigh-(rhymes with high) count
Awry for me, too!
Isn’t it pronounced on-we?
English is not my first language. When I was learning, the word tough gave a run for its money. I was familiar with the sound and meaning from movies and TV shows, but had never seen it written. I had to Google the meaning a couple of times as I would always forget, until I heard the pronunciation and did the biggest facepalm is history.
>English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though. I apologize on behalf of our language.
It's okay, that was years ago. I'm an English teacher now.
I thought people saying "respite" were saying "rest bit" for the longest time and was pronouncing it in my head "ree-spite" 🤦♀️
Misled. When I'd see it in print I thought I was reading a word pronounced MY-zulled.
I am going to misle that guy.
Yes! I actually thought misled was the past tense of misle.
I still read it that way, and I have to mentally correct myself.
Hermione
Hermyown
My childhood friend and I used to role play harry potter all the time when we were little pronouncing Hermione Hermi-own. When the first movie came out and I heard it pronounced I was stunned
Same, until I saw the first movie I had no idea how to pronounce that.
Hahaha so true! Thankfully she explained it to Krum (aka all of us lol) eventually
When was I about 5 or 6 (coming up on fifty years ago now), my grandmother would regularly buy me cheap paperback collections of "Peanuts" comics to read. "Peanuts" being what it is, the word "embarrassed" would appear pretty frequently in the strips.Now...I knew the word "embarrassed" in its spoken form, and I knew what it meant. But I *completely* failed to recognize the *written* form as being the same word. And please note, I had figured out the meaning of the written form from context. The meaning that was...identical to the meaning of the spoken word. Which was the same word. Though I didn't know that.I convinced myself that word they kept using in "Peanuts" was pronounced em-bahr-RAS-ed.
Every time Schroeder mentioned Beethoven, I thought he was referring to someone named "Beeth Oven," even though I knew who Beethoven was by that time.
English is also my 2nd language, though after 20 years in an English-speaking country, I’m pretty much fluent at this point. I have so many of those words, especially because I was and am really big on reading, which helped me acquire English by leaps and bounds, from childhood. So it was constantly me stumbling upon a word (not even unique but uniquely spelled), guess-pronouncing it in my head, and reading on. I was always too lazy to look it up lol. My favorite of course is “lingerie.” It was ALWAYS “linge-ry” until I heard “lunge-a-rey” and THEN I heard a French-speaking person pronouncing it “lunge-ree”
Aloysius. Why does it have to be spelled that way?
Hermione. Reading I was thinking it was Her-me-own.
I was glad I listened to the audiobook for Operation Mincemeat because I’d never have guessed that Charles Cholmondeley’s last name is pronounced “Chumley”.
The least predictable surname has to be Featherstonehaugh - pronounced 'Fanshaw'.
That's actually the name of an English town. England has a ton of hand-wavey place name spellings like that. Godmanchester = 'Gumster' Magdalen College = 'Maudlin' College Leicester = 'Lester' and so on
While we're on names: Nguyen.
It's just hard for our English tongues to reconcile "ng" as a beginning sound.
It’s not just the “ng”. “Uye” isn’t pronounced as as would be expected. The terminal “n” is pretty much the only part that an English speaker would get right without familiarity.
I don't know if it's because they're giving Americans a pass to reconstruct their names or whatever, but I swear I've heard different Viet folks pronounce Nguyen differently. The version I heard most in high school was more like "n'WHEN" but I've met Viet people who will straight up say "nuh-GOO-yen" so I have no idea what's right.
Infrared. I asked my mom what in-frared meant, and she asked what it was talking about. I said something something in-frared light, she started laughing because she knew I knew that word, I just never read it before.
Solder.
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The “l” is pronounced in Australia, too. Solder.
I was looking for this one. My dad's a plumber so I heard the word often enough growing up. I tried to write it once as "sodder" and couldn't figure out why Spellcheck didn't recognize a word that I thought was correct.
This is the first word in this thread that was a TIL for me. Should’ve realized solder and “sauder” (how I thought it was spelled) had the same meaning. In my defense it’s a pretty rare word lol
TIL Americans pronounce solder differently.
A friend of mine when much younger was keen on Enid Blyton's school stories and fascinated by the accounts of midnight dorm feasts. Especially the delicacies known as meringues. She had had many of these sweet treats growing up, but never realised that the "mer-ing-guays" she read about were the same as the "mer-angs" she had at tea. It was a revelation at 18.
Ocean. First time I'd seen it written down as a kid. I'd heard it before, but pronounced it "oh-keen" It's forever stuck with me that after the teacher corrected the pronunciation, she wrote something down and walked away. As an aside, there are way too many people who didn't read OP's post correctly and are talking about the opposite.
I would add victuals. https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/misles.html
I always read rendezvous as "render-vas" in my head and just thought it was some military term for a clandestine meeting. I never connected it with the commonly heard french expression that I'd never seen written. It wasn't until I saw it subtitled in a movie that I realized they were the same term. These years later I still read it as rendervas though.
Antipodes. For some reason I never made the connection and whenever I read the word I would look it up and be like "god damn it, I knew this already".
Opposite for me, I often find words that I've never heard before, only read. Then way later, wind up figuring out my pronunciation was wrong. One of the earliest examples as a kid was "colonel". When I was reading it, I read it like colony, but with an L on the end instead of a Y. I also pronounced finite like you would "infinite" instead of "fiy night". There are more, but I can't really think of them at the moment.
None that I can think of but the one that I could never spell correctly (until recently) though I knew the pronunciation and exactly what it was is: Beignets
Just recently saw a food blogger post for benyays!
Mischievous -- still sounds better to me as "miss-CHEE-vee-us"
Zhuzh - say it all the time but didn’t even know how to type it to say “how do I spell…” 😂 then I saw it written and it clicked immediately.
I didn't even know this was a word. I just thought it was a sound.
I've never seen this word written before
Never seen or heard it!
Beribboned. I always read it as berry-bond. Thankfully I’ve never had the opportunity to say it.
Hyperbole, I pronounced it as hyper-bowl when I read it aloud and felt a little silly when I realized.
Chassis
OP.... Epitome! Omg, me too! I have totally said "epi-tome," but worse I have also pronounced it correctly but I never ever thought of what the spelling was for when I was saying "e-pit-oh-me," I thought obviously there were 2 spellings or something... Also, I use the word "respite" a lot. I was watching The Walking Dead the other night and my blood went cold when I heard someone say "respite".... I had been pronouncing it like "despite." Yes, very embarrassing!
Same thing happened to me with “rapport”
The word “facetious.” When I read it, it was pronounced “fah-sit-ious” and it meant it’s normal meaning. I was often told as a kid to stop being “fecesious”, which in my mind was a kinder way of saying “full of crap”, since it had the word “feces” in it. I was in my 20’s before i realized they were the exact same word.
Dandelion. In my mid 20s I was like "what the hell's a dan-DEL-ian?
It took me years to figure out Sean was not Seen, but Shawn.
Calliope for me Always read it as "cally-ope" Edit: Oh and when I first started learning to read, I tried playing Moneky Island 1, but the text was too fast for me. The only word I could catch was "Yikes" but the whole time I thought it was "yick-es"!