Mispronouncing Words

100 most commonly mispronounced words in English

This great link from dictionary.com has funny and frustrating mispronunciations that you hear all the time, like “Askteriks.”

I just ran across this mispronounced words link last night using a great Firefox plugin called Stumble or StumbleUpon. You tell it the kinds of things you are interested in and then click the toolbar button. It takes you to a site it thinks you will like! Very addictive already.

In South American Spanish, the mispronunciations I notice fall into two categories (though there are probably more). The first are like pronunciation vs. pronounciation: the former is correct, but doesn’t the latter make more sense? The primary example of this is that rain is lluvia, but raining is lloviendo rather than the sensible lluviendo. You hear people getting it wrong.

The second category has to do with consonant combinations involving the S sound. Pizza is commonly pronounced PEEK-sa, and Pepsi-Cola is PEK-si.

I don’t have a lot of room to talk: I can barely pronounce Accelerator in Spanish (accelerador), and for years when I was younger I pronounced foliage “foilage” and dexterous “dexterious.”  Then there was my brother’s family-famous pronouncement, “I won’t let that DEE-ter me.”  Live and learn.