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”.
Anything that shows the awful inconsistency in phonetics.
Caveat
Albeit, caveat, awry, segue, haphazard, and facsimile are all pronounced weirdly and incorrectly for those who learned a lot of English by reading.
Tabernacle
Tabernak!
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”.
“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.
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.
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?
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
Bowl
Hip.
“Cwm”
One of a few words that use W as a consonant. (This is how the word “Pwn” works too)
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!”
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.
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.
scootin n’froody for anybody wondering about pronunciation.
Absolutely, certainly when shouting with a harsh voice.
Syzygy
Just for the spelling really.
Scrabble has entered the chat
“Weirdest”
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”.
“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.