Words you pronounced wrong because you only read them and didn't hear them

[Gloomy]

I just remembered I used to think meme was pronounced either “meh-meh” or “mee-mee”.

[cato]

God, so many words.  The worst part is, even after I finally hear them spoken aloud correctly, my brain often doesn't override my pronunciation with the correct one.  It has been an outright struggle not to pronounce "albeit" as "all-bite".  "All be it" just doesn't sound right to me.

 

Ennui was another one.  "Eh-new-ee" vs. "enn-wee".

[spencexists]

I comepletely forgot how to pronounce Gnocchi last time I saw it (its NYO-KEY) and theres this composure dude named Dvorak and apparently its pronounced DIVORJACK

[dgt]

forte

 

as in "one's strength or strong point"

[Luftschlosseule]

Lapel and debris. Who would think that those two words are pronounced French when everything else is always butchered? xD

[Guest]

Nothing here.

 

[Luftschlosseule]

23 hours ago, 154057 said:

These two words are pronounced very differently throughout the English speaking world, which are also different to the French pronunciation.

Good to know! I believe my realisation came from listening to the Potterless Podcast.

[FelicityBlue]

Premise. I pronounced it as pree-mys and got corrected on it. I'm sure there are tons of others though

[Elevn]

oh i always made the mistake of pronouncing each syllable (it's a little common where im from) 😅

 

Comfortable (kom-four-ta-bl)
Temperature (tem-pe-ra-choor)

 

and i didn't know albeit was also 'all-be-it'.... 😅

[Waist of Thyme]

I just remembered that I used to think the ni in nihilism was pronounced like in nickel, and similarly that the hi in the word was pronounced like in hit. 

 

It was years after I first saw the word that I heard it out loud, and at first I didn't even recognize it as the same word because of how off I was. I guess I never thought to compare it to the word annihilate, which has the same pronunciation on the ni and hi.

[Virelai]

I still remember sometime in elementary or middle school I was asked to read out loud a section of a reading and I got to the word "colonel" and said it like "colo + nel" instead of the proper pronunciation. >.<

[CocoKitten]

There are 3 that come to mind.

Preface. I always read it as pre-face when it's really pref-ace.

Linoleum. Whenever I came across this word it would just be a jumble of syllables in my head because I had no idea what it was. I finally settled on leeno-le-um.

Melancholy. I remember this was a vocab word in English and I was so confused when my teacher said it. And now every time I watch Megamind I'm just reminded of it.

[SorryNotSorry]

"Fetish" used to throw me because it's not spelled "fettish". It looks like "feet-ish".

 

"Virile" should be pronounced "vy-ril", not "veer-il", else it should be spelled "veerile".

 

I've mentioned this before in another thread, but I pronounce "Semitic" as "Sem-ITE-ic". Arabs and Jews are Semites, not "Sem-itts". Similarly, Chinese is a Sine-ITE-ic language, not a "Sine-ITT-ic" one.

 

If English and French both went over to the International Phonetic Alphabet, chaos would result. The tears would fall long and hard, though the sky would not.

[SorryNotSorry]

On 3/7/2021 at 11:24 PM, Ally123 said:

I comepletely forgot how to pronounce Gnocchi last time I saw it (its NYO-KEY) and theres this composure dude named Dvorak and apparently its pronounced DIVORJACK

I once heard some guy on KCRW characterize English as "the language where diacriticals go to die". It's true, we don't accentuate our native words with things like umlauts, cedillas, tildes, or whatever that little v mark above a Z or a C is called. It's tough enough for us to use bits of punctuation for that purpose.

[Sea Lemon]

8 hours ago, CocoKitten said:

Preface. I always read it as pre-face when it's really pref-ace.

I still pronounce it like that! 😬😂

 

The one that always got me was "misled" - I always assumed from the spelling that it was pronounced "mizzled"! It took me until I was about 23 to figure out that it's literally just "mis-led" without the hyphen! 😂

[Twy]

There are so many words that I don't know how to pronounce... 😅 English pronunciation is super random. 

 

But, if I had to choose one that was quite embarassing when my friends explained the right way:

 

Awesome. 

 

 

[Phalena]

Envelope. Pronounced: [ˈenvəˌlōp] but I thought it was "innv'äläpp"

[Kernel.Panic]

Edinburgh

Gloucester

Islay

 

and many other town/location names

[Still]

I used to think epitome was pronounced "epi-tome" instead of "e-pih-toh-me".

[Guest]

I thought viscount was pronounced viz-count.

[bare_trees]

Dachshund!  I still have trouble remembering it's not pronounced "dash hund" for some reason.

 

Moped.  The small motorcycle.  I assumed it was pronounced like the past tense of mope.

[SorryNotSorry]

Don't even get me started on Dutch, Gaelic, and Polish. The Dutch J is pronounced like a Y, the aa is not pronounced like Hawaiian a'a (the apostrophe denotes a catch in the voice), and the oe is not pronounced like "I'm moen the lawn". Gaelic spelling is even more confusing—I was surprised to learn the gh doesn't represent a gagging sound, like Arabic ghayn. If you try to pronounce Polish words without becoming familiar with the spelling, you'll end up making noises like R2D2.

[Ashmedai]

Haha, I only had a brief touch with it, but the only hard part about Dutch are the G's

[Ceebs]

When I was a little kid, anything that might've been considered a tortilla was not the type of thing my mum ever would've bought, and so I never heard the word pronounced. I came across it printed somewhere eventually, and I assumed 'tor-TILL-uh' was how you said it.

 

And 'potpourri' was 'POT-purry'.

[Waist of Thyme]

20 hours ago, Still said:

I used to think epitome was pronounced "epi-tome" instead of "e-pih-toh-me".

I heard the word epitome before and still thought epitome was epi-tome because I didn't know they were the same word.

[daveb]

I've been listening to a British podcast called Terrible Lizards and realizing they pronounce some of the dinosaurs differently than I thought I heard from Americans. Not just a difference in accents, but also in emphasis and how the broke up the syllables. (like how people jokingly mess with emphasis on syllables in those words)

[Acing It]

14 hours ago, Woodworker1968 said:

Gaelic spelling is even more confusing

Gaelic is a real stinker isn't it?

I think Loughborough is a placename that's difficult for a lot of people. It's not pronounced lowbrow. Then there's Van Gogh as well, which is pronounced Van goch like in the Scottish word loch as in lake. Not van go or van goff.

I find carribean particularly difficult for some reason and always get it wrong somehow.

[daveb]

4 hours ago, Acing It said:

I think Loughborough is a placename that's difficult for a lot of people.

Is it more like luff-burrow?

[NerdAlert93]

awry and sedated.

[Blaiddmelyn]

I've always pronounced worry to rhyme with sorry - because that's how I read it as a kid and my mum (whose first language is not English) pronounced it that way. I did not know I was pronouncing it wrong till I was 17 when my mates asked what I was saying.