From gif to hors d’oeuvres, most people have a word that they just can’t seem to pronounce correctly.
And now people from around the world have revealed the tricky spellings that never fail to trip them up in a hilarious online thread.
Twitter user @byepoleher, from Washington DC, kicked off the discussion on Friday when she posted: ‘Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.’
Within hours her tweet had gone viral, with more than 13,000 re-tweets and a flood of replies from linguistically challenged people sharing the words they struggled to get their heads around.
So how many of them can you pronounce?
Tongue-tied? Twitter users have revealed the words that they struggle to pronounce – from apropos to quinoa (file photo)
One Twitter user admitted they struggled to pronounce the words segue (pronounced ‘sɛɡweɪ’) and demense (pronounced ‘dɪˈmeɪn’) in an online thread which has gone viral
Hubris ‘hjuːbrɪs’ is pronounced differently to debris (‘dɛbri’) despite similar spellings
Sew, so and sow, are pronounced differently to sow and sough, as this user discovered
Apropos (‘aprəˈpəʊ’) tripped up Twitter user Holly Alem, she confessed in the thread
Akua confessed to pronouncing the world posthumous like the popular Greek dip
Massachusetts (‘masəˈtʃuːsɪts’) is notoriously hard to pronounce as this woman learned
Twitter user Assilem confessed to pronouncing archive phonetically, as ‘our chive’
This woman admitted to getting annoyed at colleagues mispronouncing ‘mocha’ and ‘breve’
Twitter user Marty Ward couldn’t understand why ‘rhetoric’ is not pronounced in the same way as ‘rhetorical’
Ethereal (‘ɪˈθɪərɪəl’) is not an easy word to pronounce as Lisa Leach learned the hard way
This Twitter user inadvertently reads the word Pilates as ‘pilots’ leading to much confusion
Erin reeled off a long list of words she struggled to pronounce, from vinyl to quinoa
Twitter user Lin Rowan pointed out possible confusion attached to the phrase ‘military coup’
This man mistakenly pronounced French word hors d’oeuvre (‘dəːvr(ə’) as ‘whores do-ever’
‘Inevitable’ and ‘queue’ were the two words that tripped up Twitter user Maddie, she confessed
The word lieutenant is pronounced differently in UK and US English, as this man pointed out
Chihuahua is a tricky one to say out loud but it’s certainly not pronounced as ‘chi-who-a-who-a’
Greek God Hermes is not to be confused with luxury label Hermès, as Christine Roberts noted