Words you realised you pronounce different or wrong?

[heartbroken22]

What words have you realised aren't pronounced the way you pronounce them? How did you find out? Tribute was pronounced try bute by me. Only realised when a child corrected me 😂

Mine was picturesque too. I said pictureskew.

I always interpreted misled as (phonetically) myz- ild- I thought it was derived from ‘miser’ and in my head it was to do with deprivation of fact or truth. I still have to correct myself. Again, an early reader.

Others - demon read with a ‘deh’ rather than ‘Dee’, the classic awry!

Dour - I always said doo -r

and physallis like syphallus

I think doo-r is an acceptable alt pronunciation of dour. Or at least, I’m wrong too!

‘Colonel’ how it’s spelt - col-oh-nell
i remember reading it aloud in class and everyone laughed at me 🤦🏻‍♀️

one of my parents also pronounces Fountain/Mountain as Foun-Tane and Moun-Tane. Strange!

Hermione!

I was an early reader too.

I remember reading island as is- land when paired with an older child (who I adored) and he laughed at me. Oh, the burning shame. I knew how it was pronounced really, but I read phonetically in my head.

I’m 45 and was corrected two weeks ago by my dh!

I am wound up by anyone that says mischievous incorrectly

eg my exdp (and many others) says mis-CHEE-vee-us.

in my head, Alicia (from Mallory Towers) was Alickia.

As a child I read a book where the main character was “Melaine”

it was years and years later I realised that her name was actually Melanie

Epitome
ULEZ

Does anyone remember Supernanny Jo Frost and “unacceptable”?!

My own downfalls in my youth were ‘Yosemite’ and ‘charisma’.
Thankfully have mastered them now!

Automaton - assumed it was like automatic not ortomahtun. Only clicked a few years ago watching Antiques Roadshow.

How do you say it? Do you just mean that your exdp just puts the stress on the second syllable rather than the first? Or do you pronounce it with four syllables, i.e. mis-chee-vee-uhs?

The word that I used to get wrong was the wine Rioja. I didn't find out until my 50's that the j in the middle was pronounced like a k, not like j in July.

Three syllables.
thwre is no second -ee sound. Look at the spelling!
MISS-chi-vus

Misled. Always pronounced still do as my-zled (ending as in gambled). If it's going to be pronounced miss-led it should be spelt missled!

I thought acne was pronounced AC een🤦‍♀️ my children had to point out that GIF. Was not pronounced jif

You have just given me a flashback — me too. My parents weren’t able to read well enough to read to me, so I puzzled out a lot of things (often wrongly) myself, very young.

My first university tutorial featured me saying ‘hyper-bowl’ AND ‘feet-I’d’ for ‘foetid’.

Apparently, zoological is not pronounced zoo-o-logical, but some way like ZO-ological, or zoo-logical. But I'm not sure which.
As a kid, I always wanted to go to Pom-pe-ii. Took a long time for me to learn it's pronounced Pom-pay. (Got there, loved it!)

I didn't say anything when MIL told me they were going to Maj-or-ca, pronounced as in Major. Even after they'd been she said it like that

My autistic son is very particular with English and a voracious reader. I kid you not he read Lord of the Rings ages 5.

He used to pronounce words the grammatically correct way for years which isn't the way many words are said. He struggled with that.

I remember at school doing a class reading of The Crucible for GCSE, and one of the boys mispronouncing 'whore' as "war' to general hilarity. In fairness to him, though, there's no good reason that words like who, whom whose, and whore don't pronounce the 'w' when pretty much every other 'wh" word does.

Segue gets me too, even now I know how it's pronounced. My brain just wants to pronounce it a bit like siege...

I had a role in a production of a Sondheim musical that required me to sing

HE TALKS SOFTLY OF HIS WARS
AND HIS HORSES AND HIS WHORES

Which took a lot of careful enunciation to be intelligible.