I don’t know if this counts as a word people get confused with another word, but a lot of people misunderstand “penultimate” as being “even better than ultimate.”
As in, Such-and-such a person is the ultimate example of beauty-- no, she’s the penultimate!
"Penultimate actually means second to last. “Ultimate” means last, “penultimate” is the first runner-up. You hear it in linguistics a lot, when people talk about the “penultimate” syllable in a word. In “Oklahoma,” “ho” is the penultimate syllable.
Yes, that’s the only one I’m familiar with as a Brit. But I thought that was the pronuncation @california_jobcase was referencing when they said it rhymes with matrimony. I guess that begs the question of how you pronounce matrimony.
Ah, good point! I didn’t realize there’s a UK/US difference in the pronunciation of “matrimony”, but apparently there is. The OED says “matrimony” is pronounced /ˈmatrᵻməni/ in the UK, but /ˈmætrəˌmoʊni/ in the US. Note the long O (/oʊ/) in the third syllable with secondary stress in the US pronunciation. I don’t know which one @california_jobcase was referring to. (Yet another example of the confusion that results when people write about pronunciation without using IPA.)
Actually I’m not sure if the /oʊ/ phoneme occurs in UK English. All the words that I think of as having a long O are listed in the OED with different pronunciations in US vs. UK English. “Pony” is /ˈpoʊni/ in the US but /ˈpəʊni/ in the UK. Same for “phoney” (/ˈfoʊni/ vs. /ˈfəʊni/), “joke” (/dʒoʊk/ vs. /dʒəʊk/), “post” (/poʊst/ vs. /pəʊst/), etc. However these differences are not the same as the one between the two pronunciations of “matrimony”, whose third syllable has a schwa in the UK rather than the /əʊ/ in these words.
Well, according to the online Oxford Learner’s dictionary, ˈmætrɪməʊni is how it’s pronounced in the U.S. and what I meant.
So, ˈæntɪməʊni is the U.S. pronunciation that rhymes with it.
Neither pronunciation given is how Martha pronounced it!
I’m guessing ænˈtɪmənɪ is how she said it. I got this by copying the antinomy pronunciation and swapping the places of the n and m in it.
[quote=“RivkahChaya, post:244, topic:971772”]
"Penultimate actually means second to last. “Ultimate” means last, “penultimate” is the first runner-up.[/quote]
This. The “pen” prefix basically means “almost”. It’s also used in the word “peninsula”, where the “insula” part shares the same etymological roots as “insulate”, one definition of which is “to make into an island.” So “peninsula” means “almost an island.”
Moving on:
Populace: a noun referring to the people of a country or region.
Populous: an adjective used to describe an area as being densely populated.
Examples:
“The pandemic affected the entire populace of New York.”
I’m not sure anyone ever got those two confused, but if we’re doing words that have absolutely no connection but by weird coincidence sound almost alike, that’s a winner!
I’m pretty sure I got them confused when I was a child, when I was old enough to have heard of the German autobahn, but didn’t know what the Audubon Society was. So I thought there was an Autobahn Society, which I assumed must be a club for people who liked to drive fast.
Ah, gotcha. I did something similar as a kid with Pacific and specific. I knew something specific was small in some sense, so I couldn’t figure out why the biggest ocean was called the Specific Ocean.
Depreciate means to lower the value of something.
Deprecate means to express disapproval, or (often in relation to computers) to indicate that some construct is obsolete and should no longer be used.
Both the spelling and the meaning are close enough that they are often confused. I frequently see someone say that a programming construct is “depreciated”.
You can use the search tool (click on magnifying glass at top right of the page), then click on “in this topic” to restrict the search to just this specific thread, and then search for Calvary or cavalry.
When I do that, I see that yes, somebody has already brought it up: