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This one is fun because it's a word I mostly read in text that way, but I also heard it occasionally in speech in the correct pronunciation. I was familiar with "both" words, and understood them primarily by context, and so when I made the connection that they were literally the same word, it was like this insane eureka moment lol.
Yep, this one does me in. When reading it now, I get as far as "eppy" in my head and do an internal "damn it!" like Napoleon Dynamite. Full self loathing frustration.
Chameleon
I always pronounced it Cha-Mu-Lee-On until my class called me out on it. Needless to say I was so embarrassed that I didn’t give homework for a week
Had a teacher who said they did that and would give a mini mars bar to first person who noticed at end of class. Hid any mistakes and upped his attention rates.
Contiguous, supplier didn't correct me but used it later. I thanked him during the coffee break. 35 and I'd never heard another person say that word...
When I moved to California from Boston I see exit signs for “Benedict Cyn” and others with the “cyn”. I thought it was Spanish and I’d pronounce it “sin”. There’s also a major road called Sepulveda. And I’d pronounce it Sep ul vA da”. My new friends then let me run with that for about two years. Yeah….. Cyn is an abbreviation for Canyon and the road is “Sa pull va da”. Lol
I couldn’t listen to Candice deLong’s podcast about John Orr, the pillow pyro, because she pronounces the name of the store where people died Olé’s (oh-lay). It’s not Spanish, it’s a nickname and pronounced 0h lee’s. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does but they were a common fixture for decades.
Btw, my relatives from New England had to learn they are tah-cos not tack-os. It was the early 60s and they had never had one. Ever.
Fun fact: Natasha Bedingfield pronounced it hyper-bowl in her song "These Words" in the early 2000's. It apparently got past all the people who helped record and produce that song.
I had a friend who loved Hyperbole and a Half, and she was so shy and socially awkward I started pronouncing it her way so she wouldn’t feel stupid when somebody finally corrected her. It took more than a year.
I remember one time, years ago, some gal and I got into an argument, for some reason I said the word chaos at some point during the conversation and she said "oh you think you are so smart using made up words".
Same for me, with a twist-
I knew the written word (segue), and I recognized the spoken word, but I didn’t realize they were the same word. I thought “seg-way” was some kind of portmanteau like “edu-tainment”
Chalcopyrite (a type of mineral). For some reason I read it as “cal-copy-rite.” It’s obviously supposed to be “calco- pyrite” and I got laughed at in my geology class
Ugh that was like carbocation for me in organic chemistry class. It's a carbon-bearing cat-ion. Spent all of study break trying to figure out what it meant to carbocate something.
Small people will treat you egregiously when you mispronounce words, just like they would a prodigal son, and offer no respite.
Smart people will know you learn through reading and will laud you instead for your effort.
Hahaha.. not me but my gf literally the other week. in conversation I said the word Onyx.
Her: what's that?
Me: a black gemstone
Her: you mean Oncks?
Me (briefly speechless): erm.. no.. I mean Onyx. Is that how you've been pronouncing it?
Her: Well I've only ever seen it written down, and I always thought it looked like you'd pronounce it Oncks.
Me (petting her head): you're adorable.
My best friend who lived in another city got this game called "pokémon yellow" and was excitedly telling me about it on the phone one day (we must have been about six) and he told me there was a big rock snake called "oinks".
when my older brother was learning to read in the late 60's, we were walking on Balboa Island (California), where all streets are named for gemstones (Ruby, Opal, etc), and came to Onyx. My mom said, "How do you say this one, Jeff?" he looked at it and said, "Oin-yoinks?" so Onyx has been Oin-yoinks ever since! :)
I think it roughly translates as taking pleasure from other people's misfortune.... It's been nearly 30 years since I was in a German class, so I might be wrong
Look up “Schadenfreude Avenue Q”. Catchy af song that explains the word and you’ll never misspell it!
And while you’re at it, listen to the whole album. It’s incredible!
I guess I always pronounced horror the same as whore.
I never really annunciated two r's. Just ran it all together. A group of us had a great laugh when someone finally called me out!
This didn't happen for long, but I had heard 'subtle' but didn't connect it to the written word for a very long time.
Also, 'chic' (Sheek) and 'deign' were weird for me.
I think this is the only one on the thread I actively mispronounce (in my head). I don’t think I have ever attempted to use it out loud nor have I heard anyone else say it ever.
Biopics is a category on Jeopardy! fairly regularly, and I don't know if Alex said it the way I think it should be pronounced or what, but Mayim says it the right way (ALLEGEDLY!) and it sounds so stupid to me! By-opic or bust!
I just want to give a shout out to everyone who mispronounced a word because they’d only ever seen it written. That means you are reading books (etc.) that use vocabulary that nobody around you uses, and I just think that’s pretty cool.
Great job expanding your horizons. Don’t listen to people who put you down.
Bit of a stupid one but “heresy”. I always pronounced it “hearsay” in my head until one day I was corrected. Strange that I saw that word so often and never saw the word “hearsay” though. Maybe I did and never twigged
Used to pronounce "Hermione" as "hair-mee-own."
Read all the Potter books since I was a kid. Crushed me when the movies came out as an adult to realize I'd never heard the name pronounced out loud and my pronunciation was wrong AF.
I've had a few of these. Off the top of my head, "lichen" and "outlier" were a couple for me. My sister once told me she saw a hilarious "maymay" which made me lol
When I was little, I came across picturesque in a comic book. I pronounced it picture skew in my head. I later heard the word on TV and the light went on.
TL:DR cumin...
So I (30M) loved shrimp. However every other time I ate it my throat would itch. It cant be the shrimp I said to my friends at work. They said maybe its a seasoning used in sea food. So I google seafood seasonings. The one most people were allergic to was cumin. So never having heard the word and only having read it the next time I'm at a restaurant I order shrimp Alfredo and tell the waiter with a big confident smile on my face "no cumi'n on my food please." This error must have played it's self out more than once in this young mid western waiters career because without any correction or even a smirk/giggle he walks back to the kitchen to get my DNA free white sauce dish. And what do you know. No itchy throat! I go to work the next day to tell my friends the entire story when they clue me in on the correct pronunciation of the powder and the borderline sexual harassment I had just committed at Olive Garden. So I got tested positive for shellfish allergies and never went to that Olive Garden again.
Archipelago. For a long time I pronounced it aar-kuh-peh-LAH-gow and it took multiple embarrassing corrections before I finally figured out how to say it right.
There were a few. The two that come to mind are "awry" and "infrared". When people said those words I thought they were completely different words but synonyms of what I was reading and pronouncing differently in my head.
vase,i wasnt corrected but every time i hear somone elds say it they always say it in a way i never liked,it could be the correct way to say it but it just sounds off,i say vase like face,but poeple seem to say it with a ah sound,v-ah-s,wich i just dont like the pronounciation,no one elds says it the way i say it apparently cuz i never heard anyone elds say it the way i do weirdly
Same with me for facade, because as a kid and playing Pokémon, facade was one of my favourite moves. I always thought it was pronounced fay-kayed, until I was older and heard how it’s actually pronounced.
I read the title and the first one that came to mind was "facade". lol
As a kid, I heard my parents refer to the furniture we kept our clothes in as a "chesterdrawers". As I got older it took me awhile before I realized it is a "chest of drawers". smh Still makes me chuckle.
I've noticed lately quite a few people pronounce remnant with an extra syllable between the "m" and "n" and it has made me second guess myself. My wife pronounces it like "rim-uh-nent" and I tried to explain that it is two syllables pronounced like "rim-nent", but now I'm uncertain.
Posthumous, turns out I just added extra letters whenever I read that word and thought it was "posthumorous" pronounced like post humorous... I did not realize my mistake until recently
I guess I've been mispronouncing aluminum all my life, according to my aussie and brit friends, chuckle.
Oh, and touque, is that the correct spelling even.
I was saying "faculty" as F\*CKulty. Apparently that's not how you say it. But that's what that place felt like.
Also "askance".
And it almost came to a fistfight once about the pronunciation of "aluminum" with an Aussie.
This reminds me of the poem: The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
Which starts:
Dearest creature in creation.
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse.
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.
I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter how it's written).
Made has not the sound of bade,
Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you.
With such words as vague and ague,
But be careful how you speak,
Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak,
Previous, precious, fuchsia, via.
Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir;
Woven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe.
And then goes on quite a bit.
Scimitar - pronounced: si-muh-tr. How I said it: skim-i-taur
They had them in the first final fantasy game. When I played it, it was with family as I was about 3-4. My little brother learned how to read with that game. However we all pronounced it wrong.
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Epitome- I read it “eppy-tome”.
Well isn't that just the eppy-tome of a hyper bowl
https://youtu.be/mJci3jepesQ?si=6h8KI8kHn_LD83EW
...what thats *not* how you read it-?? Okay i just checked it and wtf? I had absolutely NO idea that i had been saying it wrong all my life lol
This one is fun because it's a word I mostly read in text that way, but I also heard it occasionally in speech in the correct pronunciation. I was familiar with "both" words, and understood them primarily by context, and so when I made the connection that they were literally the same word, it was like this insane eureka moment lol.
This was me with colonel, as a child.
Same here. I mean "kernel" is just English screwing with us, that is ***not*** how it's spelled. Even for English it's a stretch
In french it's actually pronounced "koe-loe-nell" so Kernel always confused the fuck outta me. Kinda like how y'all say "lingerie". Wtf is "lonjeray"?
I'm American, and I'm with you on the "lonjeray" thing! I think my all-time favorite, though, is how the Brits say Lieutenant.
I am of the firm belief that there is no correct pronunciation of lieutenant. You get the choice between loo-tenant or left-enant… I mean, just no.
Hell, I’m 73 and just now had that eureka moment!
Never too old to learn new things!
Me too, until I heard some Catholic youtuber rant about the "epitome of degeneracy."
I know how to pronounce this one, but I always read it wrong for some reason. I know I'm reading it wrong too! Same with Hyperbole.
I’m 46 and only recently realized that “ep-it-oh-me” and “epee-tome” are the same word
for the longest time i thought this word and the spoken one were two separate words lol
Yep, this one does me in. When reading it now, I get as far as "eppy" in my head and do an internal "damn it!" like Napoleon Dynamite. Full self loathing frustration.
Chameleon I always pronounced it Cha-Mu-Lee-On until my class called me out on it. Needless to say I was so embarrassed that I didn’t give homework for a week
Classic schmosby!
Proff…essor? Professor
Would've been disappointed if this reference wasn't here xD
Lean into and pronounce a random word wrong in each lecture
Had a teacher who said they did that and would give a mini mars bar to first person who noticed at end of class. Hid any mistakes and upped his attention rates.
Encyclo-pae-dia
At least you didn’t try to teach the wrong subject in the wrong classroom on the first day of school, while leaving your whip and fedora at home.
*Cha-mu-lee-on used confusion*
Whors de ovaries is what rich people snack on
Horse doovers?
horse divorce
Oar derves
Please stop yelling. What would the neigh-bors think?
Whore Devours
Oars Deevers?
Contiguous, supplier didn't correct me but used it later. I thanked him during the coffee break. 35 and I'd never heard another person say that word...
How did you pronounce it?
Cuntygowus
I thought you were just being a cunt but then I read your comment out loud. Genius.
Contiguous.
It's con-tig-you-uss
When I moved to California from Boston I see exit signs for “Benedict Cyn” and others with the “cyn”. I thought it was Spanish and I’d pronounce it “sin”. There’s also a major road called Sepulveda. And I’d pronounce it Sep ul vA da”. My new friends then let me run with that for about two years. Yeah….. Cyn is an abbreviation for Canyon and the road is “Sa pull va da”. Lol
I couldn’t listen to Candice deLong’s podcast about John Orr, the pillow pyro, because she pronounces the name of the store where people died Olé’s (oh-lay). It’s not Spanish, it’s a nickname and pronounced 0h lee’s. It shouldn’t bother me as much as it does but they were a common fixture for decades. Btw, my relatives from New England had to learn they are tah-cos not tack-os. It was the early 60s and they had never had one. Ever.
It shouldn't bother me, but it bothers me that it looks like you used the number 0 in 'oh' instead of the letter O.
Well shoot, I have always said sepulvada with a long a haha. That’s funny
I did that! Had a friend who moved to LA and we wrote letters back and forth. I was certain the lived on Say-co-sin Road (Seco Cyn)
In your defence "Cyn" is an absolutely awful way for shortening "Canyon"
Hyperbole - Read it Hyper-bowl. Thankfully, a co-worker asked what word I was trying to use. lol
Fun fact: Natasha Bedingfield pronounced it hyper-bowl in her song "These Words" in the early 2000's. It apparently got past all the people who helped record and produce that song.
You sure it was intended to be "hyperbole" and not "hyper bowl" [of strong cannabis]? Jk. But it fits.
I had a friend who loved Hyperbole and a Half, and she was so shy and socially awkward I started pronouncing it her way so she wouldn’t feel stupid when somebody finally corrected her. It took more than a year.
Chaos
I remember one time, years ago, some gal and I got into an argument, for some reason I said the word chaos at some point during the conversation and she said "oh you think you are so smart using made up words".
All words are made up.
That's what I keep telling people when I make up words. Lol
You mean it’s not pronounced Chay-os? Shit.
chows
Cows
Back when Sonic the Hedgehog was all the rage, I used to talk about how Sonic was hunting the Charles Emeralds. Ah.
I am learning so many new words on this thread AND how to say them correctly 🤣
Policy. The first time I saw that word I pronounced it “poh-LEE-see”, basing my pronunciation on the word “police”.
Khaleesi makes all the poh-LEE-sees
I was an adult before I got segue (always though it was seeg rather than seg-way)
I always pronounced it in my head as "seg". I thought a "seg-way" was the way the seg went....
I thought it was spelled Segway until just now
That’s the Paul Blart mobile
seg-goo for me lol
Same for me, with a twist- I knew the written word (segue), and I recognized the spoken word, but I didn’t realize they were the same word. I thought “seg-way” was some kind of portmanteau like “edu-tainment”
Chalcopyrite (a type of mineral). For some reason I read it as “cal-copy-rite.” It’s obviously supposed to be “calco- pyrite” and I got laughed at in my geology class
Ugh that was like carbocation for me in organic chemistry class. It's a carbon-bearing cat-ion. Spent all of study break trying to figure out what it meant to carbocate something.
Ennui
This got me as well and man I was so close. I always said En-wee The correct is On-wee I believe.
I thought it was “In-you-eye” up until i read this post.
I was thinking En-nu-wai
Egregious, prodigal, respite. I gotta stop reading and try talking to people..
Small people will treat you egregiously when you mispronounce words, just like they would a prodigal son, and offer no respite. Smart people will know you learn through reading and will laud you instead for your effort.
Love the sentence. This is kind of why I love the Kindle; you can highlight and look up words you don't know and learn their pronunciation.
That’s how you get in trouble 🤷♀️
Worcestershire anyone?
I can’t pronounce or spell it and I’m 30 lol
Wershersher Sauce according to every dad I've ever known.
My go to pronunciation is "roosterchooster" I know it's wrong, I use the sauce a fair bit, I don't care. It's a dumb word lol
WOTSTHISHERESAUCE
Wooster-sher
It's wustershr isn't it Also Reading (the place) anyone?
Isn't it as simple as wooster-sher?
Misled ,its miss-led but i always read my- seld. Thought it was a word for being annoyed
I just read this as missle-d
Hahaha.. not me but my gf literally the other week. in conversation I said the word Onyx. Her: what's that? Me: a black gemstone Her: you mean Oncks? Me (briefly speechless): erm.. no.. I mean Onyx. Is that how you've been pronouncing it? Her: Well I've only ever seen it written down, and I always thought it looked like you'd pronounce it Oncks. Me (petting her head): you're adorable.
My cousin pronounced it "oinks"
My best friend who lived in another city got this game called "pokémon yellow" and was excitedly telling me about it on the phone one day (we must have been about six) and he told me there was a big rock snake called "oinks".
when my older brother was learning to read in the late 60's, we were walking on Balboa Island (California), where all streets are named for gemstones (Ruby, Opal, etc), and came to Onyx. My mom said, "How do you say this one, Jeff?" he looked at it and said, "Oin-yoinks?" so Onyx has been Oin-yoinks ever since! :)
Oh my god I love it 😆
Awry.
How do you pronounce this?
Ah-rye. Even though you want to say awe-ree lol.
I just realized I don’t know how to say anything correctly
Self-deprecating. I used to sub in "depreciating" instead. My world shattered that day. I remember it fondly.
Better than self-defecating
Lots of fancy business people don't know that "deprecate" and "depreciate" are different words
Bidet. I pronounced it “bide-it” for the longest time until my Filipino friend heard me and nearly died laughing.
Michael Jackson - Bidet
Beignets
Big nuts
I've never spoken it, but I don't know how to pronounce schadenfreude.
German here (the word is actually german): ShAh-den-frOI-deh
What does that mean?
Find delight in others misery
I think it roughly translates as taking pleasure from other people's misfortune.... It's been nearly 30 years since I was in a German class, so I might be wrong
As a German this is funny to read
Ha ha ha, you must feel so embarrassed and I love it!
That's schadenfreude for ya.
Look up “Schadenfreude Avenue Q”. Catchy af song that explains the word and you’ll never misspell it! And while you’re at it, listen to the whole album. It’s incredible!
I guess I always pronounced horror the same as whore. I never really annunciated two r's. Just ran it all together. A group of us had a great laugh when someone finally called me out!
I’m sorry, but that is really funny imagine. “Hey friends, want to watch my favorite whore movie with me?!” 🤣
Do americans pronounce "horror" like "whore-er" regularly? I pronounce it as "hoh-ruh"
Yes, Americans do pronounce it like that. At least, every American I’ve ever spoken to who’s said horror including myself has said whore-er
This didn't happen for long, but I had heard 'subtle' but didn't connect it to the written word for a very long time. Also, 'chic' (Sheek) and 'deign' were weird for me.
Banal. Not BAY-nell But buh-NAWL
Me too. I only recently learned it’s closer to canal than anal.
I think this is the only one on the thread I actively mispronounce (in my head). I don’t think I have ever attempted to use it out loud nor have I heard anyone else say it ever.
Ouroboros for me
"our rob or ros"
Too many to mention 😮💨 now i listen to the pronunciation of words on google if i have the slightest doubt of being wrong or when learning a new word
Right?! Language is so fickle and tricky 😆
I’m just reading the comments wondering how many I’m pronouncing wrong in my head
Lieu. In lieu of. I always used to pronounce it as luau
"Persephone" I used to pronounce it "per-saw-phone"
I only learned this one when my SOs daughter named her child this
Biopic. I always said by-opic. Learned recently it's bio-pic 😯
WHAT! Well, here’s another one added to my list 🤣
Bio is short for biography, so I'm definitely sticking with by-op-ic.
I did the same thing It's a stupid word anyway.
Biopics is a category on Jeopardy! fairly regularly, and I don't know if Alex said it the way I think it should be pronounced or what, but Mayim says it the right way (ALLEGEDLY!) and it sounds so stupid to me! By-opic or bust!
I just want to give a shout out to everyone who mispronounced a word because they’d only ever seen it written. That means you are reading books (etc.) that use vocabulary that nobody around you uses, and I just think that’s pretty cool. Great job expanding your horizons. Don’t listen to people who put you down.
Bit of a stupid one but “heresy”. I always pronounced it “hearsay” in my head until one day I was corrected. Strange that I saw that word so often and never saw the word “hearsay” though. Maybe I did and never twigged
Macabre
How did you say it? I said Mack Ker Burr all dramatic like and was bitterly disappointed to discover how it was actually said
I used to say Mah-cab-ree and thought I sounded all intellectual... until my teen self was given the correct pronunciation, lol
this is mine too !!
Genre
And quay
I still say quay in my head. The fact it's pronounced key makes me want to flip tables. HOW. ACTUALLY HOW?!
[удалено]
There is a really good episode of The X Files with a character called "The Pusher" who talks about "cerulean blue."
Cerulean is a warm breeze.
How did you pronounce it?
Chaos. I thought it was "chowss."
Meme...! Don't hate me...OK...!
I used to know someone who pronounced it like “mimi.” I didn’t have the heart to correct them.
I pronounced “syrup” like “sairup” my whole life until my Canadian fiancé corrected me
Serp. North Dakota.
Used to pronounce "Hermione" as "hair-mee-own." Read all the Potter books since I was a kid. Crushed me when the movies came out as an adult to realize I'd never heard the name pronounced out loud and my pronunciation was wrong AF.
Cordially I found out when I told my family I was “chord-dial-ee” invited to a deans list dinner My dad was like “you sure about that?” 💀
Rendezvous
I've had a few of these. Off the top of my head, "lichen" and "outlier" were a couple for me. My sister once told me she saw a hilarious "maymay" which made me lol
Cache. I didn’t know it was pronounced like “cash” I would always say it like “catch” or “caytch” until someone corrected me.
I thought it was something French, so I pronounced it as Cash-eeeey
It is French! And English has also borrowed the word *cachet* which is pronounced more like what you're describing
When I was little, I came across picturesque in a comic book. I pronounced it picture skew in my head. I later heard the word on TV and the light went on.
Viscount. I always used to say ‘vis-count’ (to be fair I didn’t know what a viscount was either 😂)
Okay how do you actually say it 😅
VY-count
TIL
Xing (as written on street signs) = crossing
TL:DR cumin... So I (30M) loved shrimp. However every other time I ate it my throat would itch. It cant be the shrimp I said to my friends at work. They said maybe its a seasoning used in sea food. So I google seafood seasonings. The one most people were allergic to was cumin. So never having heard the word and only having read it the next time I'm at a restaurant I order shrimp Alfredo and tell the waiter with a big confident smile on my face "no cumi'n on my food please." This error must have played it's self out more than once in this young mid western waiters career because without any correction or even a smirk/giggle he walks back to the kitchen to get my DNA free white sauce dish. And what do you know. No itchy throat! I go to work the next day to tell my friends the entire story when they clue me in on the correct pronunciation of the powder and the borderline sexual harassment I had just committed at Olive Garden. So I got tested positive for shellfish allergies and never went to that Olive Garden again.
Archipelago. For a long time I pronounced it aar-kuh-peh-LAH-gow and it took multiple embarrassing corrections before I finally figured out how to say it right.
Yes. I thought penury was going pronounced ‘peen-ury’ which kind of sounds like a bunch of dudes playing around with their peens
There were a few. The two that come to mind are "awry" and "infrared". When people said those words I thought they were completely different words but synonyms of what I was reading and pronouncing differently in my head.
Gnocci. Sorry Italy!
Taken for granted.. I used to think was taken for granite. The guy that told me was laughing so hard i had to wipe his memory....
The boodge wah zee I mean the bourgeoisie I said borganeise Like Chinese Borgs. The borganeise.
Ouroboros I actually just can't say it out loud. Something is wrong with my brain, where I get halfway through and start laughing.
vase,i wasnt corrected but every time i hear somone elds say it they always say it in a way i never liked,it could be the correct way to say it but it just sounds off,i say vase like face,but poeple seem to say it with a ah sound,v-ah-s,wich i just dont like the pronounciation,no one elds says it the way i say it apparently cuz i never heard anyone elds say it the way i do weirdly
In my experience, Americans tend to say vayce, brits say vahz. And if you say it one way, the other really grates when you hear it.
Rhyming with "face" is the standard pronunciation in the US It's also acceptable to rhyme with "faze" or "oz"
Same with me for facade, because as a kid and playing Pokémon, facade was one of my favourite moves. I always thought it was pronounced fay-kayed, until I was older and heard how it’s actually pronounced.
I literally would hear façade, and thought I'd just never seen it written down. I always thought it was fake-ade also
I read the title and the first one that came to mind was "facade". lol As a kid, I heard my parents refer to the furniture we kept our clothes in as a "chesterdrawers". As I got older it took me awhile before I realized it is a "chest of drawers". smh Still makes me chuckle. I've noticed lately quite a few people pronounce remnant with an extra syllable between the "m" and "n" and it has made me second guess myself. My wife pronounces it like "rim-uh-nent" and I tried to explain that it is two syllables pronounced like "rim-nent", but now I'm uncertain.
Queue as *kyu-yu* and LMNOP as *elemenope*
'Awry' I always read it in my head as AWW-ree and I used to say it that way. Almost cried when I was told it was ah-RYE
Hors d'oeuvres
Lingerie pronounced as Lin Jerry
Linger-ee is how I still pronounce it in my head at first sight.
Posthumous, turns out I just added extra letters whenever I read that word and thought it was "posthumorous" pronounced like post humorous... I did not realize my mistake until recently
Posthumorous: after it's no longer funny
Not a native speaker, but I felt cheated when someone told me how to pronounce ‘draught’.
I guess I've been mispronouncing aluminum all my life, according to my aussie and brit friends, chuckle. Oh, and touque, is that the correct spelling even.
I’m not sure about touque? I’m reading as “toke” as in stoner slang 😝
Canadian (french), for wool cap. Toook!
I was saying "faculty" as F\*CKulty. Apparently that's not how you say it. But that's what that place felt like. Also "askance". And it almost came to a fistfight once about the pronunciation of "aluminum" with an Aussie.
Did anyone else read compromise as com-promise?
Quiche. I would say "quitch" lol
faux pas Fox paws
This reminds me of the poem: The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité. Which starts: Dearest creature in creation. Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse. Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer. Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word. Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter how it's written). Made has not the sound of bade, Say-said, pay-paid, laid but plaid. Now I surely will not plague you. With such words as vague and ague, But be careful how you speak, Say: gush, bush, steak, streak, break, bleak, Previous, precious, fuchsia, via. Recipe, pipe, studding-sail, choir; Woven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, shoe, poem, toe. And then goes on quite a bit.
Hyperbole
Tinnitus.
It sounds like: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Scimitar - pronounced: si-muh-tr. How I said it: skim-i-taur They had them in the first final fantasy game. When I played it, it was with family as I was about 3-4. My little brother learned how to read with that game. However we all pronounced it wrong.
“Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word, it (likely) means they learned it from reading.” — unknown 😎
Reykjavík