Words Commonly Mispronounced | Merriam

Introduction

English is famously difficult to spell. It asks us to accept the inconsistences of has and was, do and go, and to resign ourselves to the logic-defying set of “ough” words, like bough, bought, tough, though, and through. A word like lachrymose helps us justify our spelling bees (which, incidentally, are nearly unique to the United States), while millions of children (and adults too!) each day look at Wednesday and wonder: why?

The state of English spelling is partly due to the mongrel nature of the language (it’s essentially a product of Anglo-Saxon aka Old English, Latin, Old Norse, and Anglo-French), and partly a consequence of longevity; English is more than a thousand years old and languages are inherently vulnerable to the vagaries of time.

One result of the confusing and often counterintuitive nature of English spelling is that it affects pronunciation: when a word’s spelling doesn’t relate in an obvious way to the way it’s pronounced, the word is apt to be pronounced incorrectly.

This is a list of some words that frequently get mispronounced—because English is hard.

Ragout

Pronunciation: \ra-GOO\ play

In culinary contexts, ragout refers to a stew of well-seasoned meat and vegetables cooked in a thick sauce; in other contexts it’s a general term for a mixture or mélange. In any context, it’s pronounced \ra-GOO\, despite the fact that it looks like a mashup of the words rag and out.

Ragout comes by its weird pronunciation etymologically: it’s from a French word, ragoût, which itself comes from French ragoûter, meaning “to revive the taste.”

Colonel

Pronunciation: \KER-nul\ play

The lack of agreement between spelling and pronunciation in this word (defined as "a military officer who ranks above a major") can be blamed on some noble, but ultimately unhelpful, intentions.

The French took the word colonnello from Italian—it comes from the word for “column,” and it referred to the leader of a column of soldiers—but the French altered the spelling to coronel. (Substituting l's for r's, and vice versa, is something that languages sometimes do to each other's words.) The word came to English from French in the mid-1500s, but by the mid-1600s, the etymologically “correct” (but by now confusing) spelling colonel was adopted in both French and English. Luckily for French speakers, the French later also altered their pronunciation, and today pronounce the \l\, but English speakers stubbornly kept the original \r\ and suffer the consequences still.

Primer

Pronunciation: \PRIMM-er\ play

There are two primers: the older word, meaning “a small book” or, more broadly, “a short informative piece of writing,” is pronounced \PRIMM-er\, while the word meaning “an initial coat of paint” is pronounced \PRY-mer\. In British English, both words are pronounced with the long "i" sound (\EYE\).

Victuals

Pronunciation: \VIT-ulz\ play

Victuals means “supplies of food” or “provisions,” and comes from the Latin word victualis meaning “of nourishment.” It went through French before it came into English, and the pronunciation was presumably established based on the French spelling vitaille before the spelling was changed to better reflect the Latin root of the word.

Victuals would be spelled "vittles" if its pronunciation dictated its form, and vittles is in fact given in our dictionaries as a variant of victuals, but it's not so serious a word—the definition includes the note "now chiefly used playfully to evoke the supposed language of cowboys."

Solder

Pronunciation: \SAH-der\ play

The silent "l" in solder ("a metal or metallic alloy used when melted to join metallic surfaces") isn’t completely exotic: other, more common words like salmon, calm, walk, should, and calf also typically have one. But since solder is encountered less frequently than these (and is perhaps spoken more frequently than it is written), it’s a tricky one.

The "l" wasn't always there: up until the 1500s, most spellings of solder didn't include it. But its Latin ancestor is solidare, "to make solid," which seems to have been used to justify adding the "l" in.

Viscount

Pronunciation: \VYE-kownt\ play

Not \VISS-kownt\.

A viscount is a member of the peerage in Great Britain ranking below an earl and above a baron. Etymologically speaking, a viscount is a "vice-count" or inferior count. A count, in case you're wondering, is "a European nobleman whose rank corresponds to that of a British earl."

Awry

Pronunciation: \uh-RYE\ play

If something is awry, it’s amiss or askew—that is, it’s off the correct or expected course (“our plans went awry”), or it’s in a turned or twisted position or direction (“my tie was all awry”). Awry comes from an Old English word meaning “to turn.”

Preternatural

Pronunciation: \pree-ter-NATCH-uh-rul\ play

Preternatural means “extraordinary” (“a preternatural ability”) or “inexplicable by other means” (a synonym of “psychic”). It comes from the Medieval Latin word praeternaturalis, formed from the Latin words praeter naturam, meaning “beyond nature.” In a sense, preternatural is a fancy way of saying “supernatural.”

Unlike more common words like president, present, and pressure, preternatural is pronounced with a long "e" sound (\EE\) in the first syllable.

Boatswain & Coxswain

Pronunciation: \BOH-sun\ play & \KAHK-sun\play

Boatswain and coxswain are both formed using swain, a now archaic word meaning “boy” or “servant.” The first part of boatswain is, obviously from boat; the first part of coxswain is from cok, meaning “cockboat,” a small boat. Although both words refer to people on boats, they have differences in meaning: a boatswain is "an officer on a ship whose job is to take care of the main body of the ship and all the ship's equipment," and a coxswain is "a sailor who has charge of a ship's boat and its crew and who usually steers."

Boatswain has a variant spelling that's much easier on the speller: bosun helpfully reflects the pronunciation.

Clapboard & Cupboard

Pronunciation: \KLAB-erd\ play & \KUB-erd\ play

Cupboard literally is a “cup board”: that is, a board or table on which cups can be stored—at least at its origins in the Middle Ages. The “closet” meaning dates to the mid-1500s, and the "p" and "b" of the spelling have long since merged in pronunciation. As an exercise, try saying the literal “cup board” ten times fast, and you’ll experience firsthand how language evolves.

Clapboard ("a narrow board that is thicker at one edge than at the other and that is used to cover the outsides of buildings") has a different story: it came to English as a partial translation of the Dutch word klaphout, meaning “stave wood”; it probably derives from the Dutch verb clappen, meaning “to clap” or “to hit,” from the way carpenters nailed siding to houses. The phonetic pronunciation is sometimes used for the wood siding but always used when clapboard refers to the clapping slate used in filmmaking.

Etcetera

Pronunciation: \et-SET-uh-ruh\ play

There is no other word in the English language that begins with \et-set\, which is why lots of people pronounce etcetera like it’s part of the except-excess-exciting team—that is, they pronounce it as though it were spelled “ecsetera” or “excetera.” Our dictionary includes this alternate pronunciation but it labels it as “nonstandard” because people who go about disapproving of such things widely disapprove of it.

Antennae

Pronunciation: \an-TEN-ee\ play

People don’t have trouble with the singular form of this word, antenna, but the plural form antennae doesn’t look like a regular English word, which makes it tricky.

Here’s the secret: the “ae” in antennae says /ee/, just like the “ae” in algae and Caesar. The antennae plural of antenna is typically limited to the slender movable sensory organs on the heads of insects and crustaceans (also on myriapods like centipedes and millipedes), or to something that’s reminiscent of those—(“a candidate’s political antennae”). The type of antenna on a building or car, used to radiate or receive radio waves, has a more typical plural form, antennas.

Note: the plural of larva is larvae, and the “ae” in that word can be pronounced two ways: \LAHR-vee\ and \LAHR-vye\ are both perfectly acceptable.

Epitome

Pronunciation: \ih-PIT-uh-mee\ play

The word tome comes from the Greek word tomos, meaning “section” or “roll of papyrus,” from the verb meaning “to cut,” from the time when papyrus scrolls were the equivalent of books, and were cut for ease of handling and storage. Originally, tome in English referred to one volume from a set of books. Epitome comes from the related Greek word epitomē, from the word meaning “to cut short.” Something cut short represented a summary or a collection of the important points of a piece of writing; in English epitome has such meanings as "a perfect example," and "a summary of a written work.". The apparently un-English pronunciation of epitome reflects its Greek roots; don’t let the tome connection fool you phonetically.

Mischievous

Pronunciation: \MISS-chuh-vuss\ play

The word mischievous can describe both the playful and the malicious—the mischievous behavior of a mischievous child is likely the former, while a mischievous lie is probably the latter. In the word’s standard pronunciation, there are only three syllables: \MISS-chuh-vuss\. But so many people like to add a syllable that our dictionary also gives an alternate pronunciation: \miss-CHEE-vee-uss\. We label this pronunciation as “nonstandard” because many other people think it’s wrong. It’s true that it doesn’t match the word’s spelling, but it has a nice nod to devious in it, which makes it perhaps a bit of a mischievous act in itself.

Hyperbole

Pronunciation: \hye-PER-buh-lee\ play

While hyperbole looks for all the world like it should be pronounced like a variation on Superbowl, this word referring to extravagant exaggeration is instead pronounced as \hye-PER-buh-lee\. That’s right: instead of the hyper we have in hyperlink, we get \hye-PER\, with the accent, or emphasis, on the second syllable. And instead of bole rhyming with pole, it’s \buh-lee\, like the word believe without the v.

Segue

Pronunciation: \SEG-way\ play

If segue followed the pattern of most English words ending in “gue”—like vogue, vague, league, and fatigue—it would rhyme with beg, but instead it sounds like \SEG-way.

Most often used as a verb expressing movement without stopping from one activity, topic, song, etc., to another, as in “segueing to a new topic,” segue sounds just like the name of an American company that produces electric transportation devices; that company’s name, Segway, has likely contributed greatly to the frequent spelling of segue as “segway.”

Remuneration

Pronunciation: \rih-myoo-nuh-RAY-shun\ play

Remuneration is a formal word that’s usually used to refer to an amount of money paid to someone for the work that person has done. While its spelling reflects its pronunciation—\rih-myoo-nuh-RAY-shun\—the link between its meaning and the word number likely pulls people toward a pronunciation that recalls words like numeral and numeric, but there’s no “num” in remuneration.

Menu Items

How to Pronounce the Trickiest Menu Items: After you read (and listen to) these words, you'll be ready to order anything.