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  • Mature: the one word where people think 't' makes a 'ch' sound.

    Forte: there are a lot of people who are loud in Italian when they mean to have a strength.

  • It took me years to master the Pythagorean Theorem. Not because of the math, because I kept saying Ptyagorean. My teacher laughed at me.

    I also used to say Achilles Ach-il-ees. It was bad.

  • I've actually heard many people pronounce colonel

    this way ---> (kə-lō-nl)

    instead of this way ---> (kur-nl)

    But I say (kur-nl)

    English is such a shitty language anyway...

  • When I was little I would always say "smart uh-LECK" (instead of AHL-lick).

  • some one in my history class mispronounced Nazis as naaz's

  • I cannot say "habit" right most of the time, and yesterday I could not say subscription. I talk faster than my brain allows me to most of the time. And there is always the classic, "go left here" as I point right...

  • Aloe. Every time. EVERY. TIME. I still can't tell you whether it's ay-loe or ah-loe.

  • Misled - apparently it's pronounced 'myzeld', not 'miss-led'. Thankfully my boss was not too embarrassed to point that out to me. In front of my workmates.

  • Thank you! ...I did think it was "for all intensive purposes"

  • I also hate when American people say things like "If I had a British accent, I would never shut up." Usually, they are talking about English accents, but if it was a British accent, it would be a weird hybrid of English, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh. Good luck coming up with that. C:

  • @lachatestsurlamur Technically it could be any of the individual accents themselves, also.

  • I accidentally pronounced the second "L" in Lincoln. 

  • Loved this video. Worst mispronunciation of my life: In the 4th grade, I had a book review on Harry Potter, I never had a friend named Ginny before and therefore did not know it was short for Virginia, and that it does not start with the sound 'guh' XP

  • This isn't mine, but it's my friends. In her Language Arts class they had a packet with the word stingy in it. No one knew how to pronounce it except for her. They thought it was stingy like you get stung by something.

  • The worst however is the sheer amount of people who say "your" instead of "you're". If people cannot understand basic grammar, they should not be on the internet.

  • redundant

    Sahara Desert, Rio Grande River

  • I've mispronounced Nova Scotia....never heard that pronounce in real life so...yeah.

  • The only one I didn't know both the proper pronunciation and spelling on was Edinburgh. I love words, so I don't often pronounce them wrong since I spend a lot of time with a dictionary.

    Two that I often hear that drive me insane are "drowneded" and "thy" when the speaker means "my." You do not "drowned," you are not "drowneding," and in the past tense you need add "-ed" only once to "drown." As for Old English, I love it-- when it's properly executed.

  • I wish I had an inflatable fort. That's all I got from this.

    

  • Writhed

    I learneed yesterday RYE-TH-ED not RIH-TH-ED

  • posthumous

    

  • I have a hard time pronouncing hippopotamus.

  • Noooo you made me lose the game :(

  • For the first 18 years of my life I said "trood" instead of "trod". I didn't know I was wrong until someone corrected me at College. Apparently "trood" isn't even a word.

  • I did the Hyperbole mistake but it was ok because English class isn't my first language and nobody else knew any better :D

  • You're not supposed to prononounce the 't' in 'often'. I am incapable of doing this. Oh yeah! New and improved. If it's new, nothing could have preceded it, but if it's also improved, what did you improve upon?

  • People in England use the United Kingdom in place of England or Great Britain. Our own country can't even get it right xD

  • When playing Sonic I used to mispronounce "Chaos Emeralds." I'm sure you can figure out how.

  • i lost the game :( :P

  • Don't feel bad. Facade lost me a spelling bee. I didn't know how it was pronounced so when they said it I thought it was some other word.

  • i was crying over my earthscience homework cuz i didn't know wat a THERMOmeter was... then i had an epiphany and realized it was a fucking therMOMeter

  • I always mispronounce plethora and asylum!

  • So how about Aluminium(or as you probably call it:Aloominum)?

    Maybe Capilary too? (idk about that one, maybe it just the American accent on the biology dvds we watch)

  • sidle how do you pronounce it

  • I am not sure who did the 'couldn't care less' and 'hold the fort' but David Mitchell have something very very similar. Almost exactly the same, in fact

  • I pronounced "ecstatic" as "estastic" until I was fourteen. And I still can't break the habit of pronouncing "pronunciation" as "pronounciation". Living in a country you didn't grow up in and learning the majority of one's vocabulary from books is not good for the ability to speak aloud and be understood.

  • up until a few days ago, i thought that the word "zealot" was pronounced "zee-low" because i was convinced the t was silent

  • some of those mispronunciation words surprised me because i never thought of them that way aha

  • The official name of the UK is the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland." And not all countries on the island of Great Britain are autonomous; Scotland and Wales have their devolved governments, but England does not.

  • from where I'm from, everyone calls mountain 'mounan'.

  • "Not the sequel to the Super Bowl, the Hyperbole." LMAO

  • I got purple and orange mixed up as colors when i was young and wasn't corrected until middle school, also there is a trend of saying purposly instead of purposefully, and it drives me mad. The pronunciation of the word aunt as ant is also another pet peeve of mine.

  • I always pronounce hitherto as hit-her-to

  • plaid. eventually realized it was pronounced "plad" and not "played"

  • I'm of lebanese descent, so when someone asked me what nationality I was, I said that I was lesbian

  • @LoganTheUltimate hahahahahaha

    hsaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahaha­hhahahahahahhahahahah

    hahahah

    haha

    ha

  • for some reason, a few years back, i couldn't figure out the word "parody". i said the weirdest things, both as pronunciations of the word and ways to get around it by explaining what i mean in really lengthy babbles.

  • I used to not hear the difference between "M" and "N" and in kindergarden I never remembered how to spell "d" and "b".

  • Here are some phrase that ALWAYS said wrong. Nip is in the BUD not BUTT. Lip-SYNC not sing. Seriously people always say lip sing its SYNC. I told my friend that and she said, "You're wrong. It is sing. I would know." We looked it up and she felt stupid.

  • "They will punch you in the face"

    Such a beautiful summary of the Welsh people :')

  • Arborvitae. There was an "Arborvitae Road" when I was navigating and I pronounced it as [are-bore-vi (short I)-tay]. One of the most embarrassing moments of my life.

  • @shannerz91 Arborvitae means tree of life in latin, fyi

  • this is the problem with reading your vocabulary...

    i pronounced "heretic" wrong for four years.

    and no one told me.

  • Dichotomy... (Die-ca-toe-me) I said, "dick-a-toe-me" in front of my entire Comp. 101 class while presenting a group project :[

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  • "England is not a synonym for the United Kingdom"

    YES HANK

  • David Mitchell likes this

  • It is true about the Wales/England thing. It's fun living on the boarder.

  • i hate it when people get aloud confused with allowed

  • I always noticed how people tought Frankenstein was the monster. So weird.

  • I cannot recall the word I mispronounced (evidently I am good at erasing embarrassing memories) but I had used it in essays and never heard it out loud before. I said the word incorrectly and was corrected by the people I was speaking to. Luckily I was overseas so I said "Oh, that's how we pronounce it in Australia."

  • You guys are so cool! Your videos are great.

  • Has Hank been watching David Mitchell's Soapbox? Because I just watched the Baby Name video Hank did, and it's pretty similar to David's baby name video. As is this one to the "Dear America" and "Spelling Standards" videos. I like it.

  • ya i just lost the game...

  • I use to HATE when people said "I could care less".

    after they say that, I just stand there, quietly, staring at them...

    a huge pet peeve if i ever had to say i had one.

  • I spent an entire week telling everyone I was applying for the environmental writing & rhetoric minor. Too bad nobody corrected me by telling me it was pronounced "RHE-tor-ric" rather than "rhe-TOR-ic". My adviser literally laughed in my face. D:

  • his grammer lesson about affect and effect confusses* me everytime!!

    *yes ik its spelled wrong!...it is right?

  • In English (UK) :P Its Pronounced Lefttenant even though oddly its spelt Lieutenant... I hate languages...

  • I noticed that you and John say "...and et cetera", which is redundant since et=and

  • @edennov1 Wow... you really watch closely. This matters why?

  • @halfpintstuff Well, the whole point of this video is correcting mistakes, so I thought it would be appropriate to post it here, in case they still read comments on old videos. I in no way meant it as an insult, I just wanted to help...

  • Segue. For the longest time I said it as "seeg". And I thought that segway was a separate word. NOPE.

  • A common misnomer in the south...conversate. Its converse. E.g. "We were conversating about that the other day."

  • I did not know about "meme" oh god...

  • @mickycarcar I see I never knew that about octopus. I mean that it's becoming much more complicated to understand American English because we change one word against the grammar rules we come that and we keep doing it until the rules stop applying to anything.

  • I used to read the word "applause" as "applesauce."

  • But my fort is inflatable

  • For the longest time I pronounced ethereal like "earth-uh-rul" I do not know why.

  • I didn't realize epitome written and epitome said out loud were the same word. I always read it as the way Hank said it's mispronounced so I though they were two different things...

    I also still do this but I say oriented and disoriented as orientated and disorientated. I spell them the first way but say them the second way.

  • The whole, UK, England, thing used to confuse the shit out of me. x3

  • When I was younger I could pronounce everything but...Worried. I used to say 'Wowid'

  • @IMAmyrose "manure" was my achilles heel

  • and in the NC sandhills it was not uncommon to hear "thermo meter" for thermometer and "my knees" for mayonnaise

  • . when i was kid i pronounced determined "dee-tur-mine-d"

  • When I first read Harry Potter in elementary school, I had head the word anxious, but had never seen it spelled, so when I saw it in the book, I didn't know it. I understood what it meant from the context of the sentences it was in, but thought it was a new word I'd learned. It wasn't until later, when I said it, and then had to write it for my teacher, that I found out they were the same word...... it was embarrassing....

  • @bitstar6 "heard", my keyboard, sorry....

  • I have a friend who says it pronounces it me-me, I've reminded him like 5 times already but he still says it. I swear he says it that way just to annoy me.

  • Thank you! I could never grasp why everyone was saying they "could care less." I always thought I was wrong in saying "couldn't," yet I stuck with it because it made more sense... and I was right about being right. 

    "Use to" instead of "used to" drives me up a wall.

    I can't think of a specific embarrassment, but be assured that I've lost count of the times I've Googled these phrases either because I was unsure or had to double check. I'm glad I'm not keeping count.

  • Comment removed

  • Here is one that bothers me: "I'm alright" when it should be, "I'm all right".

  • My English teacher cannot pronounce omnipotent (om-nee-poh-tent) and he cannot pronounce or spell homeoteleuton. I'm probably missing some more words. And last week a girl said fay-cade. Oh dear.

  • Also, I speak quite a bit of Spanish because of my Salvadoreno nanny, but I simply cannot master the word 'maestra' (my-eh-strah) (it means female teacher) because of the way I roll my r's. It always comes out sounding my-eh-stuh-rah.

  • My entire life, up until now, I have pronounced lapel like 'LAY-pell', not 'lah-PELL'. My mother finally told me I was pronouncing it wrong about three days ago. My embarrasment lasts on.

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  • Note: affect can also be used as a noun when referring to emotion. =)

  • I once had an argument with my Dad at the dinner table (where all discussions take place) about how he said 'pronounciation' rather than 'pronunciation'. I had to get the dictionary out and show him that 'pronounciation' is not a word. His expression was priceless :') Teenage daughter 1, Elder 0.

  • I used to be a tour guide, and for some reason, when I had a tour group, my mind would be thinking "artisan" and my mouth would say "artesian". If there is anything more embarrassing than finding out you've been mispronouncing a word without knowing it, it must be knowing how to pronounce a word and STILL getting it wrong. In public. With witnesses. I do not miss being a tour guide.

  • My Mum made the epitome mistake a long time ago. She gets so embarrassed every time someone mentions it.

  • I heard the word organism mispronounced in public... yeah. You know what it turned into.

  • If I am sometimes "disheveled" can I also be "heveled"?

  • @tuckernielson1 i know that you can be underwhelmed, and that you can be overwhelmed, but can you ever just be whelmed?

  • It's driving me crazy that he is not looking straight into the camera..

  • And stood is not spelled S-T-O-U-L-D. Yes, I have met idiots much older than me who do this. Most of them on youtube.

  • In like 6th grade someone asked me if I was left-handed or right-handed. I said, "Oh! I'm anorexic." I said that instead of ambidextrous.

  • rendezvous...yup that was my fail :D

  • I never remember the definitions for affect and effect, so I'm just going to get them tattooed upon myself.

  • When I was in 1st grade, I read What to Expect When You're Expecting because it was around. The best part of this was when I announced to my class, "Boys have a pen-is" with the first syllable pronounced as the writing implement. 

  • Every day I hear customers call ramen "roman". I just don't understand how they got that. Also, when I was taking a Women's Studies course and started dating someone in the class, I would always call patriarchal as "pay-tree-article". No one corrected me for years, because they thought I was making a joke.

  • I used to say 'psuedo' like suede-oh.

  • For nearly 30 years I thought it was paddle lock not pad lock.

    A moment that my wife will never let me live down.

  • For years I pronounced 'stingy' as "steeng-ee" instead of "stin-jee".

  • @INTPTT sting ee is right, i believe..

  • @Suzinyou No, it's stin-jee.  I thought it was sting-ee for ages, and my dad still makes fun of me for it.

  • Hank, how do you say margerine? americans say it differently to the english.

  • 1.55 that is nothing to what the'll do to you in in scotland....

  • banana chocolate ice cream I LOST THE GAME boob pen15 club~

  • I used to frequently mispronounce the word, "pronunciation."

  • I ALWAYS pronounce Socrates wrong... I say "So-CRAH-teez" instead of "SAW-crah-teez." I have a chronic problem with putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable.

  • I always pronounced melancholy wrong... pretty much until that melancholia movie came out -_-

    oh and miscellaneous. I could never pronounce that when I played the sims.

  • RBC Bank...Royal Bank of Canada Bank

  • i have to think about how to pronounce chamalean character and conscience when i read them

  • My English teacher used the Alanis song to "teach" us irony. I told her that it wasn't the proper use of ironic, just what a lot of people seem to think ironic was. She told me I was wrong. When I realized a woman who is an educator actually believed this and wasn't joking, I asked to go to the bathroom and I cried. A lot.

  • I some times have a problem with talking, so often in fact that i'm beginning to think I have some form of dyslexia, but I solve it by talking in an accent. I have no idea why it works, but it does

  • 3:30 follow the bouncing ball

  • I pronounce "adage" with the "g" being a "zh" noise, not because I don't know how it's supposed to be pronounced, but rather because I think the English language should have more "zh" sounds in it and this word is the perfect candidate.

  • I mispronounce many words since I learn most of my vocabulary from books. I also believe that education is failing. In addition to that, I believe that America's attempts to simplify English is destroying grammar and language laws which will lead to American English becoming a nonsense gibberish language soon enough. It is octopi not octopuses! Stop trying to make a language with so many irregular words have more irregular words! Soon through will be spelled thru as the formal spelling.

  • @dianan502000 Actually it is octopuses. That -us is not a Latin 2nd declension ending; it comes from the Greek "pous" meaning "foot." The *most* correct plural would be octopodes, following the rules from the Greek. But since this sounds so strange in English, octopuses is accepted.

    As for English being destroyed, the anthropologist in me would say that language always changes and no form of human language is better or worse than another. The rest of me cringes when people misspell words.

  • @mickycarcar how would the third 'o' in 'octopodes' be pronounced? Would the word ending sound like the word 'odd' or the word 'ode' (followed by the 's')?

  • @stephenhorton It is hard to tell by looking at it, which is probably why people just say octopuses. But Wikipedia claims the o is a schwa sound, so perhaps "-uddies" (?)

  • @mickycarcar awww, that's a bit of a disappointment. I think a new rule should be made. It's pronounced '-odes' when it's the subject noun, and '-odds' when it's the object noun :¬Þ watch people struggle with that one, lol

  • During a whole speech I was saying tropical instead on topical. I felt like a fool

  • Fuck that, be bold and say that the english language is embarrassing itself.

  • Actually, Scottish people do pronounce it "Edin-burr"...

  • @CannonLongshot But not "Edin-Burg".

  • @JennyTwoJackets Ahh, my bad, I misheard XD

  • You got The United Kingdom almost right, but implied it slightly wrong. Its the "United Kingdom of Great Britain", IE the union of the two Kingdoms previously on great Britain, England and Scotland, AND Northern Ireland. It is not the United Kingdom of "Great Britan and Northern Ireland" as in the Union of the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Northern Ireland. Wales misses out on a say in the name, because at the time of the Act Of Union it counted as part of the English Crown.

  • I have a friend who chronically mispronounces the word "pronunciation," which I find hilarious. I've tried to correct her, I really have. She insists upon pronouncing it pro-NOUN-ciation, even though there's clearly a NUN in it. But she blatantly eschews my correct pronunciation in favor of her flawed pronounciation as a point of pride. I don't understand why it's more embarrassing for her to admit she's wrong than to go around saying the word wrong.

  • I wrote a story and kept saying there instead of their...... I got a D on the paper for grammatical errors

  • who is john?

  • I mispronounced "lesions" once as "leh sea owns" in book club. The teacher kindly corrected me and I was like: "okay, blah blah blah" and she was like "it's good you learned it in a safe environment like here." I and the other book club members almost died laughing. The teacher was flabbergasted.

  • In highchool, there was an asian girl by the name of Bich, and new teachers and substitutes would awkwardly pronounce her name as 'bitch'.

  • I once accidentally mixed up "circumcise" and "castrate" in a room full of guys where I was the only girl. I also didn't catch my mistake immediately so I was really confused when they all looked a little afraid of me.

  • I hate in when people do that acronym thing you mentioned, "DC Comics". Really? You call your company "Detective Comics Comics"?

  • For all intensive purposes, I couldn't care less about your video.

  • I have previously mispronounced almost every word he talked about in that video...

  • I learned the word 'relatives' from a book (I, in fact, learned most of my words from books), so for the longest time, I pronounced it reh-LAY-tives.

  • In first year at my bilingual university, I was trying to tap into the francophone culture by pronouncing tasty dish of "poutine" (correctly pronounced /poo-teen/) as /peu-tain/. The humor? The pronunciation /peu-tain/ translates as "whore".

  • I've always been that shy kid that never wants to answer anything out loud for fear of being wrong. So, one day in third grade, during spelling/vocabulary time, "catastrophe" came up. I mispronounced it to the popular girl next to me and she shouted it out, "cat-tuh-strof." When she was corrected I wanted to run and hide from humiliation (even though she was the only one that knew her mispronunciation was my fault).

    Is Missouri pronounced "mi-zer-ee" or "mi-zer-uh"? It's a big controvery here.

  • foyer

  • For the longest time, I could not properly pronounce aluminum.

  • there's a person in my school with the surname 'Fuchs' pronounced 'Fooks', the headmaster had to read the name in assembly, he was tired, and inevitably swore at the entire school. it was hilarious, the same day he read out our register, and his son is in our class, he forgot one name on the register, guess who's name he forgot? :P

  • I remember vividly in 8th grade English, we were reading the Hound of the Baskervilles, and I was reading aloud to the class and said "Colonial" instead of "Colonel". Sometime in the next sentence I had realized what I'd done, and, while continuing to read, looked up and notice that no one had even noticed, not even the teacher. And that is how I taught an 8th grade English class about the British Colony of Devon.

  • I hate it when people say "irregardless" when they mean "regardless".

  • Descartes. Every time for the first three months of my philosophy foundation course. Not even my tutor told me I was saying it wrong.

  • English still rules all.

  • You pronounce your words very nicely :)

  • I was trying to be impressive in front of my friend, because I'm a show-of-y prick like that, when a MCDONALD's commercial (of all the things I could "correct") came on and I said that it was pronounced "cresendo" not "crechendo". Two minutes later I was corrected and kind of entirely humiliated when I tried to laugh it off awkwardly.

  • I said poltergeist as "polergist" because, as an eight-year-old up until about two years ago, the only time that I had noticed the word was when I was reading Harry Potter my brain was, apparently skipping words... When I found out, it was in the middle of a conversation at work and I felt like an idiot. I still say it like that when I forget to think thoroughly before I say things.

  • @bandnerd218 your not alone

  • @cakebomb77 Yay! I'm glad I'm not the only one.

    By the way, it's "you're" not "your" (Sorry, I'm an English major. I can't help myself). 

  • once i had my fly down and i was wearing birght pink underwear against black pants...

    my sister told me when we got home though to save herselhe embarassment =.=

  • I used to mispronounce lyrics - it's "le-rics", not "lai-rics".

  • This should be in a playlist alongside David Mitchell's Queen's English rant.

  • I went to the bank to cash my check one day and they had a poster up for a "BACK TO SCHOOLL" coloring contest. I laughed my ass off.

  • why is this guy so ugly, and why does he keeps on making videos o.0

  • @0181J Because half a million people love him, and he isn't going to stop for a few trolls. also, go tell his WIFE he's ugly, because i'm sure she'd disagree.