“Weirdest”
Pick any of them, and repeat it over and over again. It’ll quickly behind the weirdest word in the language, at least in your own mind.
I’m pretty sure “Purple” stops making sense faster than others. Just wtf? Pur-pull. Prrr-plll. What is wrong with people?
look.
look…
look…
look… !
look… ?
? look ?? Is this even a real word?
In scots gaelic purple is ‘purpaidh’ pronounced “pur-pee” which is equally as strange imo
Hip.
This is called “semantic satiation” which are both pleasingly weird words now that I think about it…
Bowl
Anything that shows the awful inconsistency in phonetics.
“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.
“Sphere”
That pronunciation … like WTF … did word inventors just figure we had totally exhausted the sound combinations that we could splice together?!
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.
Sounds like the linguists got drunk.
“No no no no no… iss’not a ball, issa sphhhere”
Epicaricacy. We chose to use a German loanword instead.
Or words that came from fiction like cromulent and thagomizer.
For others about to look up the word:
Epicaricacy is Rejoicing at or derivation of pleasure from the misfortunes of others
In its defence
Schadenfraude is a really fun word to say.
Absolutely, certainly when shouting with a harsh voice.
scootin n’froody for anybody wondering about pronunciation.
British English - lieutenant is pronounced “Lef-tennant”
I can’t say for certain, but it’s probably one of these.
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
With them?
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!
Schism?
Written. Ridden.
In my dialect, written doesn’t work quite as well, probably because that double ‘t’ turns into a glottal stop.
Found the londoner
General American speaker from Ohio, actually. Bottle, though, is boddle for me. Not sure why some words get it
Y is always a vowel! I don’t know why they tell children it isn’t.
A vowel is the core of a syllable. Y is not always that, as in “yes” - it works as a consonant in that word.
It’s part of a diphthong with E in that word, two or more vowels making a sound in combination.
It’s a consonant. Specifically it’s the voiced palatal approximant represented as ⟨j⟩ in IPA.
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”
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
That’s not rhyme, that’s assonance.
Biweekly.
It means twice a week.
Or, it means once every other week.
Good luck.
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.
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).
I love salubrious as it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is (health giving or healthy.)
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
Myrrh
I think thats just the sound a cat makes when it wakes up.
Here Baby Jesus, we brought you some nice smelling stuff, pretty shiny metal, and a kitten.
Damn. I wish someone got ME a kitten for my birthday. I would be like “Hey! Kitten! Why you so cute???” and she would just look at me, because she’s a kitten and doesn’t speak english. She might meow though.
Flabbergasted
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been… are all the same word.
“To be” averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. “To have” usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.
Or not to be…
Or not to have…
“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.
Same with “go” and “went”.
I god.
I came
Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:
“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.
Was going to reply that, it’s not that Russian doesn’t have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.
But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don’t know of any other language where verbs are gendered.
