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Pronunciation Advice

I am hardly an authority on correct pronunciation, but I have noticed some pronunciations that jar.

I have two motivations in developing this page. In an ideal world, perhaps pronunciation shouldn't matter if your meaning is clear. But in the real world it does. Further, I conjecture that an increased sensitivity for language will also help in writing better.

Below, I list some words that seem to cause trouble for many people. I won't presume to tell you how to pronounce them, but if you are curious, you can check for yourself. I often look up dictionary.com. If you are sure about something and the online sources seem to disagree, it helps to look up another dictionary—one of the old hardcopy variety.

Tricky Words

  1. Names

    1. Adwait
    2. Castelfranchi
    3. Cochran
    4. Cockburn
    5. Hang
    6. Huhns
    7. Likert
    8. Munindar
    9. Nirav
    10. Singh
    11. Tambe
    12. Rafael
    13. Siobhan
    14. Skype
    15. Wang
    16. Zhe

    Quite Common

    1. February
    2. Internet
    3. LaTeX
    4. Mississippi
    5. Wednesday
    6. academic and academy
    7. accelerometer
    8. adhere
    9. adieu
    10. affect and effect
    11. allow
    12. among
    13. analogy
    14. analysis
    15. assume and assumption
    16. attacker
    17. author
    18. authoring
    19. axiom
    20. bias
    21. binomial and binominal (the latter is not a common word)
    22. bury and buries
    23. career
    24. compilation
    25. cooperate
    26. dairy and diary
    27. debt
    28. decipher
    29. decision
    30. derogatory
    31. determine
    32. deteriorate
    33. diagnosis
    34. dilemma
    35. dissertation
    36. employee
    37. environment
    38. epitome
    39. equivalence
    40. etc.
    41. examine
    42. expertise
    43. five
    44. formalism
    45. gauge
    46. gauging
    47. generic
    48. higher
    49. ideology
    50. incumbent
    51. indices
    52. inevitably
    53. infinite and finite
    54. intuition (also tuition)
    55. iterate (also iteration and iterative)
    56. kappa
    57. legacy
    58. library
    59. listen
    60. manipulate
    61. mathematics
    62. matrices
    63. measure
    64. methodology
    65. modular
    66. morale
    67. necessary (also necessity)
    68. occur
    69. onerous
    70. oracle
    71. overall
    72. overarching
    73. paradigm and paradigmatic
    74. parameters
    75. pattern
    76. phenomenon
    77. politics versus political
    78. possible
    79. premise and surmise
    80. prerogative
    81. prevalence, prevalent
    82. probability
    83. propagate
    84. pronunciation
    85. psychology, psychologist
    86. quote versus coat
    87. rationale
    88. referral
    89. relative
    90. rumor
    91. social
    92. soliciting
    93. sphere (dictionary.com seems to be wrong on this one)
    94. swap
    95. synonym
    96. technology
    97. tier
    98. training
    99. trait
    100. twelve
    101. world
    102. yield
    103. Zionist

    Somewhat Rare

    1. Adidas
    2. Antarctica
    3. Arctic
    4. Galois
    5. accept
    6. adobe
    7. among
    8. amphitheater
    9. arbiter
    10. architecture
    11. baccalaureate
    12. bias
    13. breakfast
    14. cabal
    15. causal
    16. chase
    17. chimera
    18. coarse
    19. cohesive
    20. compared
    21. compute
    22. context
    23. contract
    24. courteous
    25. customer
    26. daily
    27. definitely
    28. delay and defense
    29. desideratum and desiderata
    30. domain
    31. embarrass and embarrassing
    32. emphasis
    33. expand
    34. feasible
    35. fiery
    36. film
    37. genre
    38. gesture
    39. ginger
    40. glove
    41. granularity
    42. hazard
    43. hours versus ours
    44. hypotheses
    45. individual
    46. jeopardy
    47. leisure
    48. lethargy
    49. lever versus liver
    50. leverage
    51. litigious
    52. Liu
    53. living
    54. logarithm
    55. longitude
    56. lose versus loose
    57. manually
    58. maximum
    59. Moby
    60. morality
    61. mortgage
    62. mundane
    63. none
    64. novel
    65. obesity
    66. onion
    67. only
    68. orthogonal
    69. oven
    70. owner
    71. pathology, pathologist
    72. pedagogue versus pedagogy and pedagogical
    73. Philippines
    74. plan
    75. police
    76. Poisson
    77. potato
    78. pronominal
    79. proprietary
    80. psyche (noun versus verb)
    81. quality
    82. question
    83. questionnaire
    84. Quora
    85. radiology, radiologist
    86. Rawlsian
    87. realm
    88. Realtor
    89. reliable
    90. remain
    91. renege
    92. respite
    93. restore and restoration
    94. rete
    95. scratch
    96. severity
    97. sigma
    98. significant
    99. spaghetti
    100. spurious
    101. stellar
    102. stifle
    103. stochastic
    104. success
    105. succinct
    106. target
    107. tether
    108. threshold
    109. uses
    110. utilitarian
    111. viable
    112. vignette
    113. where (also while)
    114. widget
    115. wizard