Ask Lemmy

queue

Most "Q" words are weird to start with, then just adding a bunch of silent vowels at the end doesn't make it any less so.

pulchritudinous

such an ugly word, yet it means "beautiful"

Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.

I suppose technically it's Latin, but I've always been fascinated with "syzygy".

Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been... are all the same word.

“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.

Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?

Akimbo

It's an honest-to-goodness English word and not derived from French, Latin, Greek or anything else, like a lot of the words here. Yes, it looks like it might be from an African language, but it's a squashed form of "in keen bow" meaning "well bent" or "crooked".

Pick any of them, and repeat it over and over again. It'll quickly become the weirdest word in the language, at least for a while.

Awkward is spelled awkwardly.

"Though"

The first two letters don't sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.

Gubernatorial

• Funny weird: gobbledygook
• Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
• Shortest weird: A
• Literally weird: weird
• Dangerously weird: Conservative
• Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
• Properly weird: FNORD

Biweekly.

It means twice a week.

Or, it means once every other week.

Good luck.

As a native speaker of language that is spelled the way its written. I can say that most of them are weird.

I love salubrious as it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is (health giving or healthy.)

"of"

It's just odd that you're supposed to say it like it rhymes with "love". It's also almost always with other words, so by itself it truly looks suspicious.

        of

Albeit, caveat, awry, segue, haphazard, and facsimile are all pronounced weirdly and incorrectly for those who learned a lot of English by reading.

Epicaricacy. We chose to use a German loanword instead.

Or words that came from fiction like cromulent and thagomizer.

"Cwm"

One of a few words that use W as a vowel. (This is how the word "Pwn" works too)

niggardly

British English - lieutenant is pronounced "Lef-tennant"

It's a little weird that syphilis and chlamydia are way more euphonic than they ought to be. They just roll off the tongue and feel so good to say.

"Sphere"

That pronunciation ... like WTF ... did word inventors just figure we had totally exhausted the sound combinations that we could splice together?!

I'm gonna throw "forecastle" out there. It's referring to a specific part/area of a ship, but it's pronounced similar to "folks-sole."