We didn’t just adopt this French word into English, we adopted the French pronunciation, too. In French, the letters -oup at the end of a word is pronounced. coupĪnother word that has been adopted into English from French, complicating pronunciation, is coup. Learn about where colonels sit in military rankings, here. Keeping this in mind, colonel is still pronounced. For historical reasons, which you can read about at our entry for the word, the R was eventually replaced with an L. The word colonel came to English through French, where it was spelled coronel. An antique and sadly obsolete spelling of this word is quire, which is a clearer representation of how it is pronounced. It’s tempting to pronounce the CH in choir with a sound, but that would be incorrect. That said, this word does have a particular rhythm to it that can help you pronounce it correctly. There are two elements that make the word anemone tricky-the preponderance of M and N sounds and the ending that looks like it should be pronounced like the number one. This word is so hard to pronounce that it was even featured as a joke in the popular Pixar film Finding Nemo. With that in mind, accessory is pronounced. However, each of these C letters represents a different sound (a “hard C” and a “soft C”). People are often tempted to replace the C with a single S sound. The double C in accessory is part of what makes this word tricky.

Bonus: click on each word to hear its proper pronunciation on its entry page! accessory To help give you a leg up on some of the trickier words you may come across in everyday life, we have broken down 26 of the hardest-to-pronounce words in the English language, from A–Z … or from A–W, anyway. For native English speakers and English language learners alike, there are words that are hard to pronounce. The English language is a wondrous hodgepodge of loanwords, or words borrowed from other languages all of which follow their own conventions for pronunciation, and English spelling was not standardized until relatively recently in its history. In technical terms, there is not always a consistent relationship between graphemes (basically, writing units) and their phonemes (sounds) in English. Unlike some languages, such as French or Spanish, there is not always a direct relationship between the spelling of words and how they are said aloud. The pronunciation of words in English is not always straightforward.

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