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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
Names
- Adwait
- Castelfranchi
- Cochran
- Cockburn
- Hang
- Huhns
- Likert
- Munindar
- Nirav
- Singh
- Tambe
- Rafael
- Siobhan
- Skype
- Wang
- Zhe
Quite Common
- February
- Internet
- LaTeX
- Mississippi
- Wednesday
- academic and academy
- accelerometer
- adhere
- adieu
- affect and effect
- allow
- among
- analogy
- analysis
- assume and assumption
- attacker
- author
- authoring
- axiom
- bias
- binomial and binominal (the latter is not a common word)
- bury and buries
- career
- compilation
- cooperate
- dairy and diary
- debt
- decipher
- decision
- derogatory
- determine
- deteriorate
- diagnosis
- dilemma
- dissertation
- employee
- environment
- epitome
- equivalence
- etc.
- examine
- expertise
- five
- formalism
- gauge
- gauging
- generic
- higher
- ideology
- incumbent
- indices
- inevitably
- infinite and finite
- intuition (also tuition)
- iterate (also iteration and iterative)
- kappa
- legacy
- library
- listen
- manipulate
- mathematics
- matrices
- measure
- methodology
- modular
- morale
- necessary (also necessity)
- occur
- onerous
- oracle
- overall
- overarching
- paradigm and paradigmatic
- parameters
- pattern
- phenomenon
- politics versus political
- possible
- premise and surmise
- prerogative
- prevalence, prevalent
- probability
- propagate
- pronunciation
- psychology, psychologist
- quote versus coat
- rationale
- referral
- relative
- rumor
- social
- soliciting
- sphere (dictionary.com seems to be wrong on this one)
- swap
- synonym
- technology
- tier
- training
- trait
- twelve
- world
- yield
- Zionist
Somewhat Rare
- Adidas
- Antarctica
- Arctic
- Galois
- accept
- adobe
- among
- amphitheater
- arbiter
- architecture
- baccalaureate
- bias
- breakfast
- cabal
- causal
- chase
- chimera
- coarse
- cohesive
- compared
- compute
- context
- contract
- courteous
- customer
- daily
- definitely
- delay and defense
- desideratum and desiderata
- domain
- embarrass and embarrassing
- emphasis
- expand
- feasible
- fiery
- film
- genre
- gesture
- ginger
- glove
- granularity
- hazard
- hours versus ours
- hypotheses
- individual
- jeopardy
- leisure
- lethargy
- lever versus liver
- leverage
- litigious
- Liu
- living
- logarithm
- longitude
- lose versus loose
- manually
- maximum
- Moby
- morality
- mortgage
- mundane
- none
- novel
- obesity
- onion
- only
- orthogonal
- oven
- owner
- pathology, pathologist
- pedagogue versus pedagogy and pedagogical
- Philippines
- plan
- police
- Poisson
- potato
- pronominal
- proprietary
- psyche (noun versus verb)
- quality
- question
- questionnaire
- Quora
- radiology, radiologist
- Rawlsian
- realm
- Realtor
- reliable
- remain
- renege
- respite
- restore and restoration
- rete
- scratch
- severity
- sigma
- significant
- spaghetti
- spurious
- stellar
- stifle
- stochastic
- success
- succinct
- target
- tether
- threshold
- uses
- utilitarian
- viable
- vignette
- where (also while)
- widget
- wizard
-