You must log in or register to comment.
Awkward is spelled awkwardly.
Flabbergasted
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”.
“Cwm”
One of a few words that use W as a vowel. (This is how the word “Pwn” works too)
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 ͡°)
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!
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.
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
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
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.
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.
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!
pork
From French porc from Latin.
Same as beef from boeuf.
Biweekly.
It means twice a week.
Or, it means once every other week.
Good luck.
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).
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 😒
Biweekly is every two weeks (fortnightly)
Semi-weekly is twice a week.
Same rule as bimonthly and semimonthly.
Albeit, caveat, awry, segue, haphazard, and facsimile are all pronounced weirdly and incorrectly for those who learned a lot of English by reading.
deleted by creator
It just sounds so wrong to have an adverb not ending in -ly.
So do you say “goodly” instead of “well”?
deleted by creator
Isthmus. I don’t claim to know if it’s the weirdest, but it’s gotta be one of the most difficult to pronounce!
Caveat
Anything that shows the awful inconsistency in phonetics.
Flaccid.
Kumquat
British English - lieutenant is pronounced “Lef-tennant”
