‘What’s a word you mispronounced for years and only realised recently?’ – 21 people who’ve been making very pacific mistakes

The Oxford English dictionary lists approximately 170,000 currently used words, which is a lot, so it’s no wonder that you might be saying at least one of them wrong. For example, if you’ve only ever seen a word written down, how on earth are you meant to know how it should sound?

They’ve been chatting about how easy it is to make mistakes, and how embarrassing it can be to find out you are, over on the AskReddit page after user Exotic-Philosopher75 posed this question:

‘What’s a word you mispronounced for years and only realised recently?’

Lot of people chipped in with the terms they’ve been getting wrong for their whole lives, like these…

1.

‘Segue. I fully thought that ‘seeg’ (my pronunciation) and ‘segway’ were two separate words until just recently.’
–RegentQuintus

2.

‘I called someone the epi-tome of stupid once in an argument.’
–goood_one

3.

‘Dachshund. Apparently its not dash hound.’
–Pretend_Persimmon_26

4.

‘Hyperbole, I thought it was hyperbowl ’til my 20s, not hi-per-bo-lee.’
–SinisterBrit

5.

‘Hermione Granger was Hermi-one for a long time.’
–DOW_orks7391

6.

‘I had to watch American Dad in English to find out that ‘coincidence’ is NOT pronounced ‘COINcidence’.’
–Hubsimaus

7.

‘Awry.’
–EssayerX

8.

‘Me too! I thought it was ‘awe-ree’. Made a fool of myself reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy for extra credit in high school. Yikes.’
–pufferfish6

9.

‘I never know how to pronounce the name Siobhan correctly.’
–Real-Reindeer-2731

10.

‘Posthumous. I was saying it like ‘Post hue-muss’.’
–BradyPhoenix

11.

‘Not recently but I have to share how I used to pronounce to word “queue” as ‘kvivi’. In my defence, I was only 12 and I am Croatian, it is still hilarious though.’
–flamingopickle