Nothing drives me crazier than hearing someone say “mischievous” wrong. (For the record, it’s MIS-chuh-vus, not mis-CHEE-vee-us.) But a new report suggests we’ve got much bigger pronunciation issues to worry about.
Word puzzle site Unscrambler analyzed Google pronunciation searches across all 50 states from January through October 20. And the word giving Americans the most trouble? Worcestershire sauce, with around 321,600 monthly searches. We can thank chemists John Lea and William Perrins for that one. They named their sauce after the English county back in the 1830s.
GIF came in at No. 7, reopening an argument that somehow still hasn’t been settled. Its creator, the late Steve Wilhite, insisted the G was soft, like the peanut butter brand. “It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story,” he once told The New York Times.
Salmon made the list, too, and the confusion is understandable. The L was never pronounced in English, but scholars added it back into the spelling centuries ago to match the Latin salmo. Before that, the word was spelled without it. The pronunciation never changed, though, and the silent L has been confusing English speakers ever since.
Things got even more embarrassing at the state level. People in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Nevada searched for help pronouncing the names of the states they live in. And Ohio residents were Googling how to say spaghetti. I’m not sure what happened in Ohio, but I have questions.
To be fair, English pronunciation is insane. We’ve borrowed words from all over the world, kept letters nobody says, and developed dozens of regional dialects with their own ideas about how things should sound. And when you’ve only ever seen a word written down, there’s a good chance your first attempt at saying it will happen in front of another human being. Usually a server or something.
here are the 15 words Americans searched for pronunciation help with most:
- Worcestershire – WUSS-ter-sheer
- Gyro – YEE-roh
- Dachshund – DAKS-hund
- Niche – NEESH
- Porsche – POR-shuh
- Qatar – kuh-TAR
- GIF – JIF
- Curaçao – KYUR-uh-sow
- Saoirse – SEER-shuh
- Pho – FUH
- Salmon – SAM-un
- Nguyen – WIN
- Aoife – EE-fuh
- Açaí – ah-sigh-EE
- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious – exactly how Mary Poppins says it
The good news is that googling a word before saying it means people want to get it right. Now, if we could just get everyone to stop putting that extra syllable in mischievous.
The post The 15 Most Mispronounced Words in America, Ranked appeared first on VICE.
