queue
Most "Q" words are weird to start with, then just adding a bunch of silent vowels at the end doesn't make it any less so.
I knew an English speaking American born well off white dude that pronounced this as "kway". It was the most annoying thing that came out of his mouth besides all of the bragging and "I'm smarter than everyone" attitude.
pulchritudinous
such an ugly word, yet it means "beautiful"
It's so similar to "putrid"
and "sepulchre"
Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.
It's from a political cartoon depicting a corrupt districting plan as a salamander.
A plan proposed by a man named Elbridge Gerry.
I always thought it sounded like Jerry Seinfeld between takes/shoots just hanging around the set. Not doing anything. Just ignoring everything around him. He's just gerrymandering around the studio.
Gerry meandering
I suppose technically it's Latin, but I've always been fascinated with "syzygy".
That looks like something Snoop Dogg would say.
I really only know of this word because of Scott Manley
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been... are all the same word.
Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:
"To be" being highly irregular il a common feature of a lot of Indo-European languages. But there's worse. In Spanish, "ser" and "estar" both mean "to be", but have wildly different meanings and cannot be substituted for one another.
"be" is an irregular verb in all languages, so it's not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn't have the verb "to be".
Not in Turkish. It is "olmak" but the actual "to be" as it is used in "I am, they were, etc." is, now unused "imek". it has become a suffix and it is completely regular. Just i + person suffix.
Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.
For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”
And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).
A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.
And it has multiple meanings. "you are sick" can mean that you're currently sick but can also mean that you're a sick person. Other languages usually differentiate the verb in those two cases
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_without_rhymes#Masculine_rhymes
I wanted to double-check, but I don't see any other words here that have that property, so it's probably unique!
Apparently, there’s an obsolete English word “smitham” that means (or meant) “small lumps of ore random people found.” They were exempt from taxation by English nobility so large mine owners started breaking up large chunks into “smitham” to avoid taxation. Apparently, the Duke of Devonshire put a stop to that in 1760 and the word fell out of use.
So, I think rhythm still counts as weird. Noah Webster was 2 years old in 1760 and the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t have it.
"People say the word orange doesn't rhyme with anything"
That's not rhyme, that's assonance.
The Etymology of Orange.
:-D
Orange ( Anglo-Saxon ? English language )
Oranj. ( Slavic? European? etc language )
Naranj. ( Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian language )
Narang. ( Hindi , Sanskrit Indic language )
Narthangai. ( Tamil - South Indian language )
:-D
With them?
Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?
Counterpoint - Bureaucracy.
Let me introduce you to the British pronunciation of the word "lieutenant".
lieutenant (UK: /lɛfˈtɛnənt/ lef-TEN-ənt)
It used to be spelt "coronnel" in Old French and we took that pronunciation, but then we also took the updated french word "colonel" but kept the old pronunciation.
I remember I was in 6th grade and the teacher made the class read a couple paragraphs of a book. She called on kids at random to read from their seat out loud for the whole class to hear, paragraph after paragraph. When it was my turn, the word "colonel" appeared, and it hadn't been said yet in the book. Now, I had heard of a ker-nal before, but I never assumed it would be spelled that way, so when I saw this word I just thought it was something else.
I got to the word and read it out loud as cahl-uh-null and needless to say there was many a snickering to be heard. Luckily I'm not easily embarrassed so it was fine, but I thought it was odd (and still do) that people generally act like this word being said this way is a given.
Pick any of them, and repeat it over and over again. It'll quickly become the weirdest word in the language, at least for a while.
This is called "semantic satiation" which are both pleasingly weird words now that I think about it...
I'm pretty sure "Purple" stops making sense faster than others. Just wtf? Pur-pull. Prrr-plll. What is wrong with people?
In scots gaelic purple is 'purpaidh' pronounced "pur-pee" which is equally as strange imo
look.
look..
look...
look.... !
look..... ?
? look ?? Is this even a real word?
Bowl
Hip.
While
Whyle
Whyull
Yull
Yul
Akimbo
It's an honest-to-goodness English word and not derived from French, Latin, Greek or anything else, like a lot of the words here. Yes, it looks like it might be from an African language, but it's a squashed form of "in keen bow" meaning "well bent" or "crooked".
I always assumed it was a loan word from Japanese. TIL.
"Though"
The first two letters don't sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.
80% of the letters in "queue" are unnecessary.
No, they’re demonstrating how to line up quietly.
Side note, I was a young teen when I first saw this word and it was in reference to computer things I barely grasped and had no idea. I was asking my parents what a qwe-we was because I could not for the life of me figure out how to pronounce it. It stuck with me for years until BBC content started coming to America, then it all finally made sense.
It would be half-true if we hadn't gotten rid of a letter (the thorn, which made the"th" sound)
For a long time, they used the letter "Y" instead of "th".
That's how we have weird relationships with old English words like "You/Thou," and "The/Ye."
“You” and “thou” come from different roots. They are not simply different orthographies like “ye” and “the”.
The word Through is just cheating at Scrabble
-Eddie Izzard
Awkward is spelled awkwardly.
Gubernatorial
This word makes me physically angry. Why b? Why not governatorial? It is from the same word. Government, governor, etc. I know hsitorically bs and vs change places a lot, beta in Greek is pronounced veta but just pick either v or b god damn it!
- Funny weird: gobbledyremoved
- Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
- Shortest weird: A
- Literally weird: weird
- Dangerously weird: Conservative
- Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
- Properly weird: FNORD
Biweekly.
It means twice a week.
Or, it means once every other week.
Good luck.
I usually say “semiweekly” to mean twice per week. I also say “semimonthly” to mean twice per month (24 times per year) as opposed to “biweekly” (26 times per year).
This is the only word I know of whose meaning can be redefined by majority consensus.
Case in point, my workplace wanted a bi-weekly committee meeting for our team to work on stuff over a zoom call. I asked what days these meetings would be held and they all agreed "Just Thursdays". When I tried to argue that a bi-weekly meeting necessarily means that there must be two distinct dates per week, they all agreed that bi-weekly obviously means every other Thursday and that I didn't understand what the word bi-weekly meant 😒
The fact that American English doesn't have the word 'fortnightly' is incredibly confusing on every level.
Biweekly is every two weeks (fortnightly)
Semi-weekly is twice a week.
Same rule as bimonthly and semimonthly.
I don't know about weirdest, but here are some quirky words:
-
inflammable means the same thing as flammable
-
"the/a". If you're a native English speaker, like me, it probably doesn't look unusual. I was listening to a lecture series on linguistics and it wasn't until then that I learned that most languages out there don't have a mandatory definite/indefinite article. In most languages, if you want to say "cat", you can say "cat". English requires you to say "a cat" or "the cat" -- the presence of an article to indicate whether the thing you're talking about is unique or not. That's an unusual feature for a language to have. It's baked into how I think, but a lot of the world just doesn't work that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Crosslinguistic_variation
Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages (only the definite article)[citation needed], and Polynesian languages; however, they are formally absent from many of the world's major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, many Turkic languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages, the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases.
-
"data". It used to normally be the plural of datum, but within living memory has normally become a mass noun, like "water" or "air" or "love". It's not the only word to do this, but it's unusual.
-
"deer". It's not the only word to do this either, but it's one of a small number of words in English where the plural and singular form can be (and traditionally, needed to be) identical. Today, it looks like regular forms of these are increasingly being considered acceptable, at least in American English ("deers", "fishes", etc).
fishes
Fun fact! Fishes means multiple types of different species of fish
Japanese doesn't have articles or account for number with something as simple as an s (some words could take -tachi or -ra as a plural marker, but not all, and often it isn't even used when plural unless there's specific need for it). Often, we learn something is plural by other inference or a number given. My wife has a hell of a time with articles and the like when trying to speak English.
I'm also learning modern hebrew (Arabic's writing system seemed a bit much plus all the dialects vs written MSA, so that's now a later goal) and they only have definite articles so the indefinite is the default state.
Although using "data" as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating "[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands" which is just so cringe!
Edit: typos
English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat”
Generally true but not for abstract nouns and mass nouns: "The water's warm", "I'd like a water", "Water is a liquid".
PS. It's called the zero article.
-
As a native speaker of language that is spelled the way its written. I can say that most of them are weird.
I would love to see a language that isn't spelled the way it's written
https://mastodon.nu/@jdskog/113021722561159823
I mean this.
Eye.
We take it for granted now, but I'm sure we all questioned the word at one point in our lives, the shortest word guaranteed to fool any child who is an intuitive spelling pro if they don't already know the word's spelling.
Fun anecdote, in DC the east/west streets are named A St, B St, C St, and so on. But not i street. Capital i could be confused with L Street, so all the signs are written "Eye St"
You'd think at that point they'd just name all the streets like would be appreciated.
Eye Street does live up to its name, it is the most interesting street.
And as soon as the young spelling pro gets "eye", throw "ewe" at them.
Ewe, though it's spelled weird, does at least fit its context. When looking into specific gendered terms for species, someone could expect a few weird ones.
On a side note, I find it funny how the word ewe is banned from several places because all it's ever used for is to replace the "you" in things like an F-bomb. It's like an accidental/indirect swear word.
"Hey bro, what's a female sheep called?"
"Oh that's easy, it's ew--" ban hammer crashes down out of nowhere
I was just thinking this, but with the word "one". And also "two"
By all accounts, "one" should rhyme with "stone", but bear in mind that we also have "done" which is pretty close, as well as "gone" which is pretty out-there by comparison. (This suggests the compromise pronunciation of "scone" should be "scun", but on the other hand...)
There's also that in some accents / dialects, the word "own" fills that particular pronunciation niche, necessitating an alternative pronunciation for the number.
The theory is that a non-standard regional pronunciation is the, uh, one that caught on everywhere else.
Fun fact about "two": It's the "w" making the vowel sound, and the "o" is silent (compare Latin "duo"). Even more strangely, it's "w" that makes the vowel sound in "who" as well! It was originally spelled "hwo" until all "hw" words were forced to conform to all the other modifiers where the h goes second. It's also hwy / why the h sounds out first in old-fashioned pronunciations of words like whip / hwip.
And eight.
"of"
It's just odd that you're supposed to say it like it rhymes with "love". It's also almost always with other words, so by itself it truly looks suspicious.
ofOutside North America, people say it with the O from "gone" if it's stressed.
Albeit, caveat, awry, segue, haphazard, and facsimile are all pronounced weirdly and incorrectly for those who learned a lot of English by reading.
Kerfluffle
Only has one "l"
Brouhaha is its twin brother!
Kovfefe?
I'm gonna throw "forecastle" out there. It's referring to a specific part/area of a ship, but it's pronounced similar to "folks-sole."
It uses apostrophes to the utmost: fo'c·'sle!
Where I'm from it sounds like "fuxle", or indeed "fucks'll".
"Sphere"
That pronunciation ... like WTF ... did word inventors just figure we had totally exhausted the sound combinations that we could splice together?!
Sounds like the linguists got drunk.
"No no no no no... iss'not a ball, issa sphhhere"
That's one of the things that put me off learning Greek in the end. English has unwritten rules about which clusters of consonants can come at the start of a word; Greek not so much.
British English - lieutenant is pronounced "Lef-tennant"
It's a little weird that syphilis and chlamydia are way more euphonic than they ought to be. They just roll off the tongue and feel so good to say.
"Cwm"
One of a few words that use W as a vowel. (This is how the word "Pwn" works too)
I want to argue about that being technically Welsh, but I was coming in here to say foie gras and that's French as fuck so fair enough I guess.
Cwtch is weirder I believe, because it not only comes from Welsh with its W as a vowel, but it comes from a Welsh word that has to use English spelling rules to be written both in Welsh ("cwtsh") and in its English borrowing; not to mention that it itself came from Middle English "couche" which of course came from Norman. It's a cute word though!
Literally my first comment on Lemmy!
A Welshman about to traverse a steep-sided hollow at the head of a valley: "Oh baby I'm gonna cwm!"
All I heard was "head" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Miscellaneous, no one that isn't a native English speaker knows how to pronounce that word
Acknowledge, no one that isn't a native English speaker knows how to write that word
You give too much credit to natives on writing proficiency. Neither of those are particularly hard words.
How about segue?
niggardly
Hearing this word for the first time in the GoT audiobooks was a real surprise to say the least.
" sesquipedalian "
I think "once" is spelled strangely. In Spanish it's 11 and pronounced as you would expect.
In English the same string of letters is pronounced wonss. Plus the whole once twice thrice for one time two times three times is odd, though at least consistent but then no fourse or anything it just stops.
Especially when you get to the fource, fivce, or sixce time trying to teach someone how the system is flawless.
"Fuck"
I think adjective is the only grammar variation it doesn't cover.
You have no fucking clue.
Edit to add the classic: George Carlin - Usage Of The Word Fuck - YouTube
Fucking fuckers fucking fucked. Fuck!
Dyslexia - it's hard to spell even if you're not dyslexic.
strengths
it breaks so many linguistic rules yet feels just fine to say
What linguistic rules does it break? 🤨
Onomatopoeia - the word for making a word for a sound
Glossolalia
"Kitsch" is hard to define weird. "Absquatulate" is the weirdest word I use on a semi-regular basis because it just means to leave quickly.
How about ersatz?
absquatulate means skedaddle, got it.
"Winningest"
Trump, that you?
That's a word?
"We win the most cases" is too long for lawyer billboards, apparently.
Most of the examples here are perfectly cromulent words.
"Weirdest"
Isthmus. I don't claim to know if it's the weirdest, but it's gotta be one of the most difficult to pronounce!
Vainglorious.
Tabernacle
Tabernak!
onomatopoeia (edit) - the word should have been something akin to soundsalotlikea but no one consulted me.
noun
- The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
- The property of a word of sounding like what it represents.
- A word that sounds like what it represents, such as "gurgle" or "hiss".
Flabbergasted
Kumquat
I dunno if it's the weirdest but "pronunciation" is pretty weird.
Why is it "pronUnciation" but "pronOUnce"?
Similarly I hate that restaurateur drops the n in restaurant
If it consoles you, I can explain the reason for that one.
They both come from the verb restaurer (to restore). Restaurant being the present participle in this case. In French, "ant" is equivalent to the English suffix "ing".
And restaurateur is "one who restores".
Syzygy
Just for the spelling really.
Scrabble has entered the chat
Qi, for a handy way to use a Q and not open up more space.
"fine"
because it can mean so many different things, like if you say something is fine, it's not very good, but "fine dining" is fancy and good.
pwn
When I run
grep -v "[aeiouy]" /usr/share/dict/words|lesson my system, it's the only non-abbreviation word that comes up that doesn't have a "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", or "y" and is a real word -- like, Mirriam-Webster lists it:https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pwn
slang
: to dominate and defeat (someone or something) : OWN sense 1b, ROUT entry 2 sense 1a
Online gamers use "pwn" to describe annihilating an opponent, or owning them. The word came from misspelling "own" by gamers typing quickly and striking the letter P instead of the neighboring letter O.
— Christopher RhoadsNo government, including Britain's, should have the power to pwn the Internet, and destroy it in the process.
— Amie StepanovichWhy pwn the noobs from your couch when you could do it in front of an audience at New York's first-ever Fortnite In The Heights Tournament?
—Eva KisThen, a bunch of federal attorneys general got pwned in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding their prosecution of medical marijuana businesses, which is a pretty big deal.
—Vince SilwoskiThat's in the dictionary now? I was there. 4000 years ago. When angry counterstrike players typed too fast and didn't correct their typos.
For people who pronounce it like p+own are just adding the vowel in without it being written.
I've also heard it said more like 'poon' which I guess is more true to how w would work as a vowel (uu).
Caveat
Flaccid.
I'm a big fan of the following weird words:
Indubitably
Discombobulated
Acquire (but also "require"???)
Also, "school" because my first foreign language was German
German sch roughly equals English sh, so I'd always read it as "shool". Doesn't help that the German word for school is Schule, which is read as "shule".
Indubitably
My friend used to always say this to mean "definitely". He was wrong, but it sounded sophisticated.
Anything that shows the awful inconsistency in phonetics.
Omit omitted omitting omits – omission –
The * did my t go?
I feel like we will change a lot for digital reasons, especially in coming centuries.
lemmatization - in linguistics is the process of grouping together inflected forms of a word so they can be analyzed as a single item, identified by the word's lemma, or dictionary form; (eg. walk [lemma], walks, walked, walking)
Things like inflected forms and parts of speech that can not be coded easily really have no use in the future. Things like how a sentence can be "I am here." but when I must change more than one word to say "He is here." The am/is change is nonsense of no use. It is like a deep inner conflict with no solution; a prejudice or bias.
I wonder if -tion becoming prounounced like 'shun' has anything to do with how it ended up that way.
Conjugation, inflection, and declension can give more flexibility to word order or otherwise remove words. Whether or not that's /useful/ is more subjective.
pork
From French porc from Latin.
Same as beef from boeuf.
Phone. Like why? He have the letter F...
I can't say for certain, but it's probably one of these.
Sardoodledom
Antidisestablishmentarianism
Irony
Moist
Orange, nothing rhymes with orange
Fun fact: Orange was originally "norange" misspelled. Comes from the same origin as naranja in Spanish.
