“of”
It’s just odd that you’re supposed to say it like it rhymes with “love”. It’s also almost always with other words, so by itself it truly looks suspicious.
ofOutside North America, people say it with the O from “gone” if it’s stressed.
Kerfluffle
Kovfefe?
Brouhaha is its twin brother!
Only has one “l”
Flabbergasted
Glossolalia
I love salubrious as it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is (health giving or healthy.)
deleted by creator
Phone. Like why? He have the letter F…
“Though”
The first two letters don’t sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.
The word Through is just cheating at Scrabble
-Eddie Izzard
It would be half-true if we hadn’t gotten rid of a letter (the thorn, which made the"th" sound)
For a long time, they used the letter “Y” instead of “th”.
That’s how we have weird relationships with old English words like “You/Thou,” and “The/Ye.”
“You” and “thou” come from different roots. They are not simply different orthographies like “ye” and “the”.
80% of the letters in “queue” are unnecessary.
No, they’re demonstrating how to line up quietly.
Side note, I was a young teen when I first saw this word and it was in reference to computer things I barely grasped and had no idea. I was asking my parents what a qwe-we was because I could not for the life of me figure out how to pronounce it. It stuck with me for years until BBC content started coming to America, then it all finally made sense.
“Sphere”
That pronunciation … like WTF … did word inventors just figure we had totally exhausted the sound combinations that we could splice together?!
Sounds like the linguists got drunk.
“No no no no no… iss’not a ball, issa sphhhere”
That’s one of the things that put me off learning Greek in the end. English has unwritten rules about which clusters of consonants can come at the start of a word; Greek not so much.
queue
Most “Q” words are weird to start with, then just adding a bunch of silent vowels at the end doesn’t make it any less so.
Thank the French for this one
Ah the french…alwaysbeencelebrated for it’s…excellence!
oiseau – for when consonants are overrated. (it means bird).
Eau - for when consonants are unnecessary
How is that pronounced?
You can toss it into google translate and listen to audio. It would probably be better than any attempted typing I can do here.
Wiktionary has a lot of audio transcriptions too: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oiseau
wazo
I knew an English speaking American born well off white dude that pronounced this as “kway”. It was the most annoying thing that came out of his mouth besides all of the bragging and “I’m smarter than everyone” attitude.
It’s a Q: a bunch of vowels are lined up behind it!
God damn it. That’s good.
Thanks, stole it myself!
Caveat
Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?
Counterpoint - Bureaucracy.
Is this universal or are there places where they pronounce it closer to its spelling?
They pronounce it phonetically in France, which is where it came from.
I meant English dialects.
I remember I was in 6th grade and the teacher made the class read a couple paragraphs of a book. She called on kids at random to read from their seat out loud for the whole class to hear, paragraph after paragraph. When it was my turn, the word “colonel” appeared, and it hadn’t been said yet in the book. Now, I had heard of a ker-nal before, but I never assumed it would be spelled that way, so when I saw this word I just thought it was something else.
I got to the word and read it out loud as cahl-uh-null and needless to say there was many a snickering to be heard. Luckily I’m not easily embarrassed so it was fine, but I thought it was odd (and still do) that people generally act like this word being said this way is a given.
It used to be spelt “coronnel” in Old French and we took that pronunciation, but then we also took the updated french word “colonel” but kept the old pronunciation.
Let me introduce you to the British pronunciation of the word “lieutenant”.
lieutenant (UK: /lɛfˈtɛnənt/ lef-TEN-ənt)
Most of the examples here are perfectly cromulent words.
I dunno if it’s the weirdest but “pronunciation” is pretty weird.
Why is it “pronUnciation” but “pronOUnce”?
Similarly I hate that restaurateur drops the n in restaurant
If it consoles you, I can explain the reason for that one.
They both come from the verb restaurer (to restore). Restaurant being the present participle in this case. In French, “ant” is equivalent to the English suffix “ing”.
And restaurateur is “one who restores”.
Epicaricacy. We chose to use a German loanword instead.
Or words that came from fiction like cromulent and thagomizer.
For others about to look up the word:
Epicaricacy is Rejoicing at or derivation of pleasure from the misfortunes of others
In its defence
Schadenfraude is a really fun word to say.
scootin n’froody for anybody wondering about pronunciation.
Also to sing about
Absolutely, certainly when shouting with a harsh voice.
Gubernatorial
This word makes me physically angry. Why b? Why not governatorial? It is from the same word. Government, governor, etc. I know hsitorically bs and vs change places a lot, beta in Greek is pronounced veta but just pick either v or b god damn it!
