Indictment (seriously, how do you get in-dite-ment from that?)
queue (you mean it’s not qway-yoo?)
Hermione (Hermy-own)
draught (naught, fraught, aught, caught. Seems simple… nope, draft, wtf?)
I don’t want to take this into GD territory - but I pronounced bruschetta correctly at first, got corrected (wronged?) by people into pronouncing it wrongly before researching and going back to the correct way.
Interestingly the Merriam-Webster online has it with with the “sh” sound not the “k” sound.
It rhymes with “kiwi” ;).
I used to think aria (as in operatic vocal solo) was pronounce area. Until I used it out loud one day and the people I was talking to asked “How big an area? Acre? Half acre?”
I also once thought the pronunciation for sidereal was side-real. (I still like side-real better).
Martha Stewart mispronounces antimony. She should check a dictionary. It’s correctly pronounced similarly to matrimony.
A long time ago, in about fourth grade, I remember thinking “naked” was pronounced nay-ked.
I’d heard the word before that, I’m sure, but for whatever reason never made the connection between hearing it and reading it :smack:
I used to think a loud racket was a kaw-ko-phony. (Cacophony)
Archipelago.
unique.
Incunabula for me. Lots of others, I’m sure.
Victuals and indict - I’d heard both before I’d ever read them and never made the connection. I assumed “vittles” was just an uneducated way of saying “VIC-tuals.”
But I talks more better now.
Thank you for that. Well, after I got done yelling, “Seriously?!”
My one big sit-up-straight-and-take-notice, at least until today, was ‘banal’. I don’t think I ever used it out loud, so I didn’t embarrass myself in public, but it was only a matter of time. I heard somebody use it in a TV interview one day, and for some reason it hit hard and stuck.
It is.
Oh hell, I’ll give you embarassing: I was 25.
prescient and prescience.
I was reading a lot of Herbert… and I was corrected in law school. Doh!
The composer that Schroeder liked so much in Peanuts? His name was BEETH-oven. First syllable like “teeth” but starting with a ‘b’ instead of a ‘t’. Second syllable like what you cook cakes in. When my mom told me it was BAY-toven, I didn’t believe her.
I still have trouble remembering that cavalry and Calvary are two different words, with the ‘l’ in two different places, and not homonyms. (Part of the confusion: Calvary is a hill, yes? And cavalry is often described as arriving over a hill to save the day. So I figured there was some sort of connection.)
Given that all the right sounds are there, in the right order, I don’t think a stress variation can be considered a mispronunciation. In any case, this one is pretty common.
There was a young girl of Vancouver,
Who, when told it was not ‘horses doover,’
Found she hadn’t the nerve
To ask for hors d’oeuvres,
So had soup as a saving manoeuvre.
Calliope - I used to think it was pronounced Cally-Ope.
Sounds like something you’d say to a horse, doesn’t it?
Price Fixe. Of course I was on a date.
Sinn Fein. In my defense I knew I wasn’t guessing correctly so I never said it out loud.
Denouement: I think I only learned this one in an episode of Jeopardy! from sometime in the last year.