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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. Quite Common

    1. LaTeX
    2. Wednesday
    3. academic and academy
    4. adhere
    5. adieu
    6. affect and effect
    7. allow
    8. assume and assumption
    9. author
    10. authoring
    11. axiom
    12. career
    13. compilation
    14. debt
    15. decipher
    16. determine
    17. diagnosis
    18. dissertation
    19. employee
    20. equivalence
    21. etc.
    22. examine
    23. expertise
    24. formalism
    25. generic
    26. incumbent
    27. indices
    28. infinite and finite
    29. Internet
    30. intuition (also tuition)
    31. iterate (also iteration and iterative)
    32. listen
    33. manipulate
    34. mathematics
    35. methodology
    36. Mississippi
    37. morale
    38. necessary (also necessity)
    39. occur
    40. oracle
    41. overall
    42. overarching
    43. paradigm and paradigmatic
    44. pattern
    45. phenomenon
    46. possible
    47. premise and surmise
    48. prerogative
    49. prevalence, prevalent
    50. pronunciation
    51. rationale
    52. referral
    53. rumor
    54. social
    55. sphere (dictionary.com seems to be wrong on this one)
    56. swap
    57. technology
    58. tier
    59. world
    60. yield

  2. Somewhat Rare

    1. Antarctica
    2. Arctic
    3. Galois
    4. accept
    5. adobe
    6. amphitheater
    7. arbiter
    8. architecture
    9. bias
    10. baccalaureate
    11. breakfast
    12. cabal
    13. causal
    14. chase
    15. coarse
    16. cohesive
    17. compute
    18. context
    19. contract
    20. courteous
    21. daily
    22. definitely
    23. delay and defense
    24. desideratum and desiderata
    25. expand
    26. feasible
    27. fiery
    28. gauge
    29. genre
    30. ginger
    31. hazard
    32. individual
    33. jeopardy
    34. lethargy
    35. library
    36. litigious
    37. longitude
    38. lose versus loose
    39. maximum
    40. mortgage
    41. obesity
    42. onion
    43. only
    44. oven
    45. pathology, pathologist
    46. plan
    47. police
    48. psyche (noun versus verb)
    49. quality
    50. question
    51. radiology, radiologist
    52. realm
    53. realtor
    54. reliable
    55. renege
    56. respite
    57. rete
    58. sigma
    59. significant
    60. spaghetti
    61. spurious
    62. success
    63. succinct
    64. target
    65. tether
    66. threshold
    67. uses
    68. vignette
    69. widget
    70. where (also while)
    71. wizard