The other day, my family and I went to the seaside, where I spotted objects floating in the water. “See those buoys!” I said, pronouncing the word like boys, whereupon the rest of my family looked at me oddly. They corrected me, stretching “buoy” into two syllables, more like boo-ee. (To be fair, after some online digging, it seems like the latter is the American version, versus say, the UK alternative.)
Friends, this was not the only time I’ve been corrected while speaking. I went down the rabbit hole of memories, including when I was a kid asking my parents for the definition of the words in the books I was reading. Their answer? “Look it up.” I mean, I guess that’s why we had a huge dictionary and a collection of encyclopedias.
I, lazily, did not look things up. Instead, I sounded stuff out in my head. Here’s a list of a few words that have tripped me up:
- Picturesque = picture-skew
- Salmon = sal-mon
- Colonel = call-on-nel [I hear this one’s commonly said wrong.]
- Sanguine = san-gwine
- Mores = mores, rhymes with s’mores
- Precocious = pree-koh-shus
- Scythe = sk-ife, rhymes with knife
But maybe it’s not only me? I was reading Kemper Donovan’s The Busy Body recently, and there’s a passing reference to this very phenomenon.
To investigate matters [un-]scientifically, I did an informal poll of my immediate family. We bookish ones seemed to mispronounce more, but even my younger watch-all-the-reels kiddo had a few twisted words. The resulting list?
- Moment = Mom-ent [this was my fave from the kids!]
- Society = sosh-ity
- Stereo = stih-reo
- Gesture = guess-ture [did we play the board game too much?]
- Orphanage = or-phaynge
- Poignant = pog-nant
- Solder = sohl-der
What words can you add to this list of mispronunciations?
Chicks on the Case 
I am a Jeopardy fan Jennifer and I have noticed that there are a fair number of mispronunciations by contestants. When you have only read a word and have never actually heard it said, that is going to happen. I think the word segue trips up many people. Place names are difficult, too. The town may not be pronounced like it looks like it should be. Or the name may not be pronounced the same way a famous city is.
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Huh. I never even thought about how the contestants were pronouncing things. (Too fixated on figuring out the right answer.) That’s fascinating.
Places are hard. When I was in London and visiting the Cotswolds, I felt like I stumbled over quite a few words!
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And, there are towns that even the locals pronounce differently. In Cambria, the locals are split on Cam-bria or Came-bria. 🙂
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I’m definitely familiar with that concept! I can’t think of any specific examples off the top of my head, but one podcaster I listen to was reading a letter from a listener and pronounced segue as seh-goo. Now it’s a running joke! I always think that’s an endearing habit because you know anyone who makes a mistake like that is a reader!
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Marla, I love that you and Jennifer note that often people who mispronounce words are readers who may be familiar with the word but may never have heard the word pronounced.
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See Sue’s comment above! I think seh-goo is kinda cute.
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Jennifer, thank you for this thought-provoking post. There are a wealth of words I pronounce incorrectly and undeterred. Ha! I’m fascinated by words that are pronounced differently depending on what region of a country or what country people are from. An example is aluminum. In the United States, it’s largely pronounced “a loo men em.” In England, I believe it’s pronounced “a loo min e um.” I find that fascinating. There’s a term, shibboleth, that refers to a sort of test. If a person pronounces a word with the correct regional dialect, it proves the person is from that region. However, if they don’t, then that person is an “outsider.” Fascinating.
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Undeterred–love that attitude! Aluminum, huh? Gosh, I wonder what other words are out there that I’ve regionalized.
I think we should insert a shibboleth test in one of our books! 🙂 And I wonder if there’s a Buzzfeed quiz floating around that covers this…
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That would be so fun! Oh, my word!
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So true! Once in Cornwall, my daughter and I got lost and stopped to ask for directions. A very kind woman at a shop told us to “just follow the road signs to Rayfull.” She paused and then accounting for our American accents, added, “you would probably say raff-eye-ell.” We got back on the road and the next sign we saw was for a town called Raphael.
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What a kind woman to stop to consider a way to help you recognize the sign. I love that! Thank you for sharing.
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So smart of the shopkeeper to account for accents!
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That is the one I was going to mention. I had neighbors from Wales and learned several things from them and that is one. One that is not mispronounced but labeled differently is trash can. They call it a wheelie bin.
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Such a great example. I always am amazed at how different sounding aloomenem and aloomineum are!
Also: for the pronunciation of laboratory: “labRAtory” vs “labORatory”!
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In Britain and Ireland, “aluminum” has an extra “i” (aluminium)–and also pronounce it differently from each other. Aargh!
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I’m blanking on some of my own at the mom-ent. But yes, it’s something I’ve struggled with quite often myself.
And, for the record, Colonel should either be pronounced like it is spelled, or spelled closer to how it is pronounced. Some of my issues with spelling are due to things like that.
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Mark, I have the same issues. (Looking at you, “rough.” How does one go from “dough” to “thorough” to “rough”?)
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Ah, the beauty of American English!
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I see what you did there, Mark!
(And how I wished I did better on those spelling bee rounds at school, but the tricky words always got me.)
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I love this post! And I love that it’s readers who tend to mispronounce things the most, as they run across unfamiliar words more than those who don’t much read. So let’s hear it for mispronouncers!
As for shibboleths, my favorite is that in Oxford, England, Magdalen Street is pronounced like the gal in the Bible (“Mag-dah-lin”), but Magdalen College is pronounced “Mahd-lin.” Locals love to make fun of tourists over this.
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Good one! Love that.
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Nice one, Leslie! I’ve got to keep that in mind if I ever visit Oxford.
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Then there’s Vallejo which is prouounce half Spanish and half English, and some locals just call it Valley-joe.
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As a young reader of classics (encouraged by my — and Leslie’s — parents), I pronounced “melancholy” in my head as “meh-LAN-chully”, and “prejudice” as “preh-JOO-diss”. When I got older and learned their proper pronunciations, I fantasized about having two cats with those mis-pronounced names, and nicknaming the second one Jude.
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Those would make great cat names!
(And I know one of my kids has declared that she’ll continue pronouncing a word the way she wants to, thank you very much.)
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I was a growna– adult when I realized the word I’d been pronouncing as ep-i-tome (as in ehp-eh-tome) was the word epitome (pronounced eh-pit-oh-me.)
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Oh, yes! Epitome. Both pronunciations seem fun to me, though!
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Names get me. I didn’t know how to pronounce Hermione until I saw the first Harry Potter movie.
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Did the same thing with Hermione. But I think I do that with several character names in books, especially the ones that come from the author’s fanciful imagination!
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Me too, Liz!
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I recently interviewed an author and forgot to ask him to pronounce the title of his book. It’s LEEta Pearl’s Love Biscuits and not Letta Pearl. And I’m southern, I should have known Leta Pearl would be pronounced LEEta Pearl. Oh my, I left in his correction without editing it out. It was a lesson learned, the Hard Way!
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I appreciate you leaving that tidbit in; I bet it makes you more relatable to listeners! 🙂
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I agree with Jennifer. I’m glad you left in the author’s correction. As a listener, I would appreciate that human touch, especially since I probably would have pronounced the title the way you did.
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Okay, since segue is already taken, I don’t get some British pronunciations. How do they pronounce lieutenant as “lef-tenant?”
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Wait, what? I feel like I need to up my British vocab knowledge. Maybe I need to go watch some shows or movies!
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Even though I watch a lot of Brit shows, I didn’t even notice!
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They say people who mispronounce words are usually readers, because they’ve seen the word but never heard it.
I’ve loved spy books since grade school, and I remember one mortifying 5th grade moment when I was doing an oral book report about my favorite Mrs. Pollifax book, all excited about the geiger counter she found at a Swiss spa. But when my 11-year-old self pronounced it gee-zhur, I was promptly and condescendingly corrected by my teacher in front of the whole class.
To give my teacher credit, I never forgot how pronounce it after that, and she didn’t manage to put me off spy novels.
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You were 11. Perhaps she could have left off the condescension? Good heavens. LOL!
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I love this topic! We are all big readers in my family. My mom reported reading Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and thinking the password was, “Open See Same!” I was embarrassingly in high school when I learned that the Knotses, which I’d heard my parents and others talk about, and the Nazis I’d read about (which in my head I pronounced Nae-zais, as in nap) were the same. Talk about red faced. Same with AH-wry, later learning it is said uh-WRY.
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And in today’s world, the millennials say important and words like that but put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Em-PHA-sis on the wrong sill-A-blee as Mike Myers said. The say im-po-ENT. And so on.
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Late to the party but yes! Feel amongst my people here, with the absorbing words through reading osmosis but not knowing how to say them. (And, occasionally, what they actually mean…I’ll hear myself say one and go wait, IS that what that means? *pause for Google confirmation*)
Love your examples! Picturesque = picture-skew — of course!
The one that comes to mind first is mischievous, which I always thought was misCHUHvus but recently heard others insist is misCHEEVious (and based on the spelling, they might be right).
Now I just try not to say it aloud, ha.
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Oh, it’s definitely misCHUHvus in my book! But then, I always insist on “Aunt” not “Ant.” My hubby (from the PNW) says it’s me being New England uppity.
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Jen, awesome post! I mispronounce words so often that I can’t recall a single example right off the bat. But here in New England mispronouncing place names can get you in serious trouble. Like, Worcester is Woo-stah, not War-chest-er, and Leominster isn’t LEO-min-ster, it’s Low-(as if you were saying “ouch” or “loud” without the “d)-min-stah. And Peabody is “Pea-biddy” and so on. It never ends!
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I vividly remember the first word I mispronounced: Chaos. A group of us 8th graders were talking about our current English class read and I murdered the word by saying CH-os. Luckily, the group was kind, but I was mortified.
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