One of the occupational hazards of being a reader is using a word in speech that one has read silently and stumbling in the pronunciation of said word. There’s nothing like saying a word with confidence but incompetence, watching the listener screw up their face either in confusion or laughter, hearing the illuminating correction and having a hearty laugh at yourself.
One of the joys of listening to books read on Librivox is catching an ‘oops’ from the mouth of their lovely volunteer readers. I laugh out loud when ‘the patience of Job’ is pronounced like a wage earner. One of the joys of listening to professionally produced books on tape is catching one of my own mistakes. “Oh, is that how you say it?”
My last name is commonly mispronounced. Before “No Call”, I was tipped off to telemarketers by the botched pronunciation. The grocery store clerks who look at the receipt and say “Thank you, Miz ________” make me laugh too.
And for those who care: Magistra Mater is Mah-GEE(hard G)-struh MAH-tair Think “TEA with MaGEEstra.”
Proper Nouns
Wodehouse – it’s supposed to rhyme with wood
Cowper – sounds like Cooper
Goethe – my SIL’s mother quoted Goethe and pronounced it GO-eth.
Isak Dinesen – for years, in my mind I said DINE-sen,
Camus – it is not CAY-mus, it’s caMOO
Dumas – another French name to trip you up: dooMAH
Keats and Yeats – wah, wah they don’t rhyme! KEETS and YATES
Edinburgh – it looks like it should end with a burg, right? Not! ED-in-BURR-a
My Oopses
primer – long i when it’s paint. But if it’s a book of elementary information
Orion – there was confusion when I said ORion instead of ohRYAN
vegan – hard and soft g’s trip me up all the time.
bade – the past tense of bid is pronounced BAD – forget the silent e
victual – doesn’t it look like VICK-shoe-ol? Nah, it’s pronounced VITtle
jihad – not that long ago I said JIE-had. Ouch!
Oopses from Others
xylophone – my son thought this was pronounced ex-CELL-a-PHONE
roughage – one former boss gave this a French twist, saying ROO-ahzj
chihuahua – a friend’s husband said chih-WHO-ah-WHO-ah
synecdoche – William Safire wrote about Jerry Brown (remember him?)
I’ve run out of time to ponder and remember my favorites.
Help me out, would you? Correct my corrections, if need be.
What words have you or yours mispronounced?
A Living Pencil 
My French teacher can’t say “chewing gum”
He says “shewing gum”
In fact, he says a lot of words wrong. But we love him anyway =D
DUMAS haha. dat means F*** in vietnamese but with out the S, but the same prounouncation. dooMAH.
I mispronounce my french all the time. That rolling r gets me.
Oooooooh Pull-eeeeeeeze!! Heh!
What a fun post! In our family, we have found that our daughters, who grew up in France, ended up with a good English vocabulary simply from reading extensively in English. Then as occasions arose and they used a word they had only read before, it sometimes led to smiles at their pronunciation!
Through Death I Live — I have a friend who is also named Orion, like your brother, but he pronounces his name as Or-ee-on, instead of O-rye-on, as I had called the constellation since I was little. I still have to stop and think before I say his name.
i think bade is bade (the way it’s written) i don’t think it’s pronounced /bad/. but hey potayto potahto.
lots of names get mispronounced cuz people aren’t familiar with the language. like sinead /shi-neyd/, joaquin /wa-keen/, & siobhan /shi-van/.
I came across your site yesterday and found this entry and the comments to be hilarious. It’s good to know that I’m not alone when messing up words I’ve only seen but never heard before.
I don’t know if anyone has mention it, but this phrase always trip me up: “deus ex machina.” And I still haven’t figured out the correct way to say it.
Paradigm: para-DIME or as I used to say “para-dig-ma”
Wow I had no idea it was pronounced MIS-chih-vus! I’m going to be correcting people all the time now. My friend pronounces “Produce” – like PRAW-duce, instead of PRO-duce. But Im not entirely sure which one is correct, it doesnt really matter because you still understand what she’s saying.
Heard a newsreader once refer to a “Hyperdemic nurdle” found on a beach
It really bugs me when people pronounce “Nuclear” as “nucular.” One of my science teachers did that a few years ago and I sat there in class, thinking, “nuclear…nuclear…not nucular…”
Lingerie was always Lin-ger-ee when I was a kid. But then I’m picking some the kiwi slants we New Zealanders use would rock your socks right off!
Lingerie was always Lin-ger-ee when I was a kid.
I think the way in which us Kiwis say some of our words might just make you smile as well.
chihuahua = Chee-hoo-ah-hoo-ah.fatigue= fat-ee-gyoo
for the longest time I didn’t realize “ciao” was pronounced “chow.” Even though I knew “chow” was the way certain languages (ie Italian) said goodbye, I never realized how it was spelled for a while. and so I thought ciao was goodbye in some other language and was pronounced “ky-oh.” Luckily I don’t think I ever said it out loud in front of anybody before I realized my mistake.
Enlrox, you perfectly articulated my experience. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we don’t connect words we hear with words we see.
i have a weird pronunciation bit. .
i won’t say my boyfriend’s middle name
hassani know how to say it “ha-sawn”but . . for some reason, i won’t.
I never realized that epitome was pronounced EH-pih-tome instead of eh-PIH-tuh-mee. It’s funny though… when I read it in your comments, in my head I pronounced it correctly. Then I continued reading and realized what word it was. I never say it that way!!! How can I read it correctly but use it incorrectly?
Anyways, I mispronounce mayonnaise all the time. I know that I do, but I don’t care. It’s too hard to mend bad pronunciation habits! I say MAH-nayz instead of MAY-oh-nayz. Hmm… maybe I should just say dijon… heh, another problem word for some!
Another one that’s disputed a lot is pianist. Is it PYAH-nist or PEE-uh-nist? I still don’t know the correct one!!!
As a deaf girl raised orally, I make speech mistakes every day… be careful that you don’t laugh at every person who makes a speech mistake. It’s very hard to speak fluent English if you can’t hear yourself. Deafies try very hard to speak and are usually offended if their efforts are knocked down.But it is funny to hear some words mispronounced. I say produce wrong cause i don’t realize that PRO is stressed. Some other things like that. One time I was trying to say shitake mushrooms but it came out “shitty mushrooms”… my parents and i still joke about it.
woot for wheelock’s latin!!!! ^__^
I had a roommate who always pronounced similar as si-mil-yer. I’ve been know to slip up and say it myself without even noticing, lol.
Your post came up after I posted on my own blog and I really enjoyed reading it! Also you look so familiar to me in your picture and when you mentioned that you’d lived in IL at one point…Just wondered if I knew you. Maybe not; my husband tells me I think I recognize everyone. Still you do look familiar. Were you in the Chicago suburbs?
Liberace – Libber – Ace Instead of Liber achee… My sister still won’t let me live that one down.
When I was younger, I use to say: “Dee-vastating” instead of “devastating”, hehe…
Cell phone, I used to say “cell-A-phone”.Chimney, was “Chim-UH-nee”
And yesterday, while standing before a large crowd of children, I had to read something from the Bible, the name of the city “Capernaum” came up, and, after studdering and stammering over the word I pronounced it “Cape-er-NAY-um” when it is supposed to be pronounced :”Cap-er-num” .
Funny post though, and I’ve had too many of those problems, mainly when I am pronouncing names of people or cities in the Bible.
Oh yeah, I have one of those ‘hard-to-pronounce’ last names too.That’s how we could (and still can) tell if a tellemarketer is calling. And the grocery stores are funny too.
Have a good day!-S.
I was not ambiVAYlent about your blog. I just plain appreciated it.
i’m am still confused over “chai” tea. i had thought it was pronounced “KI” but someone told me it was “CHI” plus i live in the south with many, many pronounciation errors so i don’t know who to believe. the baristas at starbucks never laugh when i say “I want a CHI tea latte…”
one favorite of mine is when the pastor sang “Let angels prostate fall” instead of “Let angels prostRATE fall.”
oh, and another one for me is chaos. i always want to pronounce it like its spell and for the longest time i did. in my mind, “CHA-os” is the same as “KAY-os” so if i heard it said, i wouldn’t even bother to correct.
what about envelope? EN-ve-lope or ON-ve-lope?
Goethe – I’ve heard people say, “gate ee”; there was a street in town called Geothe Rd. and everyone always said “Gate – Ee Rd.”
weird…very interesting post! and i love the chih-WHO-ah-WHO-ah..lol.
i have issues saying “Oregon” and “museum”…
I was laughing at you describing my bad habit of learning words by reading and butchering the pronunciation. I’m glad I’m not the only one who gets tripped up trying to increase my vocabulary. (At least I’m reasonably sure I’m using the words correctly.)
haha!
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=7169097
click on the link above to see an example of Funny Mispronunciations
this was cute. glad to say that i knew how to pronounce all the words you listed…without the explanation.
i think it’s due to listening to proper orators and speaking various languages. knowing the differences between Spanish, French, German and Croatian, for example. i’ve even come across persons who mispronounce their own names in their native tongue. it only happens in the United States, however. i’m trying to think of an example. a girl once told me her name was “Shy la” and it was spelled, “Shilo”. i’m sorry, but it’s an “o”, not an “a”… your momma told you WRONG, girl.
i went to university with a guy and his name was Andy Goethe. he said it was like, “Go thee”, emphasis on first syllable.
how many of your readers would be able to pronounce these correctly. knowing the language from which they are derived tells me right away.
Andromeche
Briseis
oh, one i’ve come across which i find a bit odd is the way those in Massachusettes pronounce “Gloucester”.
When I was a boy I always read the word MISLED as if it were mize’ld not knowing it was the same word that I heard and knew in everyday speach pronounced “miss led.” My daughter read “idiot” when she was 5 as “IDOIT”, again not realizing for years it was the word everyone spoke as “iddyot” It preset a synapse and she read it as idoit until she was grown. We got to comparing notes about our misreadings and now when we discuss the mess in Washington someone mutters about the poor mize’ld idoits. Other people don’t understand.
for some reason, I have a hard time saying specific . T_T i always say pacific . haha, they sound so similar .oooh your name sounds sort of like teacher in Latin .
i cant pronouce disney right. it’s supposed to be with 2 syallables but i say it with 3. i cant help it when i talk.
Snicker snicker. My brother once told me about a Chee-atta instead of a Cheatah and then my step-daughter came up with O-ran-goo-tan for Orangutan.
I myself have problems with uniformed, not the pronunciation of it, but when I read about a uniformed officer being sent to the scene, I always ask myself why they would send an uninformed officer to deal with something.
My step-daughter was in a style review where the woman over the course of several years pronounced ensemble as in-sem-blee. Sheesh! I even went home after the second year and looked it up.
I fell off the bed when my husband bravely used the word cunnilingus. I had never heard it pronounced, but I thought he was brave to try it.
I just read over this, and I wondered why I had used the word uninformed when it was actually uniformed. I can trick myself on that one.
Don’t know how to use spell check on this, and I am under a deadline here, so hope I spelled everything right. I can’t remember anything specific I have misprounced, but I am sure someone else could.
I just realized very recently that for 35+ years I have said mischievous wrong. I was recently at a conference with 3 co-workers who all liked eating sal-mon. I say sa-mon. I was starting to think I was the one saying it wrong…. My dad says libarry instead of library. I have trouble with umbrella.
My mom drives me insane by saying “fan-cin-a-ting” instead of fascinating. Anymore she starts to pronounce words she doesn’t know or has a hard time with then looks to me to finish the sentence for her LOL!
The Chihuahua mispronunciation is my favorite hands down.
For a long time I’ve pronounced the word “plaid” as played.
I think I am one of few people, at least among my friends, who pronounces “government” with the N. Apparently most people I know pronounce it “guvver-ment.”
The more I think about this post, the more words I think of! I still say that it’s “lightninging and thundering,” though it’s so obviously wrong. But I’m sticking to it until somebody can think of something better that’s not “lightning.”
Both my father and I have words that we know we say incorrectly and can even tell it is wrong, but can’t tell what the difference is when someone corrects us. One of mine in chimney. I can hear that it’s wrong when I say it, but I still don’t manage to get it correct the next time.
I loved the chihuahua oops! I used to always say Yosemite wrong as a kid until my 4th grade teacher laughed at me. What 9 year old knows it Yo-se-me-tee? I thought it was Yose-mighty!
indian beauty
Haha, what a hilarious and educating post!
A few of my childhood blunders…
cinnamon – “cim-ah-nin”
magenta – “mag-ah-nent-ah” ( I know, I know, haha)
I also said fatigue as “fat-ih-gyuh”
When I was younger, I was trying to teach my little sister how to say thank you and you’re welcome. She could not, for the life of her, say you’re welcome! Instead it was “your wail-we-come”. I still poke fun at her for that one : P
For those W.O.W fans out there, paladin – “pal-ih-dee-un” (per my bf and his little brother).
Sooo guilty of the dachshund one myself.
I still correct my boyfriend on herbs not being “her-bs” and chef not being pronounced with the ch- sound but the sh- sound.
And, like many others here, I absolutely laughed out loud when I read the chihuahua one, classic!
This doesn’t fall into exactly the same category, but I wonder why so many of our “trained” journalists on news programs talk about “neh-go-see-ations” going on this place or that. Do they not know that the word is spelled NEGOTIATIONS?!?!?!? I don’t know why that bugs me so.As the son of a Latin and English teacher, I enjoyed your post.
Orion – there was confusion when I said ORion instead of ohRYANOrion – there was confusion when I said ORion instead of ohRYAN
Well, I learned something today…I’ve been saying ORion all my life…I mean, it looks like that doesn’t it? and it doesn’t sound half bad either….