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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. Hang
    4. Huhns
    5. Munindar
    6. Nirav
    7. Singh
    8. Tambe
    9. Rafael
    10. Siobhan
    11. Skype
    12. Wang
    13. 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. gauging
    46. generic
    47. higher
    48. ideology
    49. incumbent
    50. indices
    51. inevitably
    52. infinite and finite
    53. intuition (also tuition)
    54. iterate (also iteration and iterative)
    55. kappa
    56. legacy
    57. library
    58. listen
    59. manipulate
    60. mathematics
    61. matrices
    62. measure
    63. methodology
    64. modular
    65. morale
    66. necessary (also necessity)
    67. occur
    68. onerous
    69. oracle
    70. overall
    71. overarching
    72. paradigm and paradigmatic
    73. parameters
    74. pattern
    75. phenomenon
    76. politics versus political
    77. possible
    78. premise and surmise
    79. prerogative
    80. prevalence, prevalent
    81. probability
    82. propagate
    83. pronunciation
    84. psychology, psychologist
    85. quote versus coat
    86. rationale
    87. referral
    88. relative
    89. rumor
    90. social
    91. soliciting
    92. sphere (dictionary.com seems to be wrong on this one)
    93. swap
    94. synonym
    95. technology
    96. tier
    97. training
    98. trait
    99. twelve
    100. world
    101. yield
    102. 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. gauge
    38. genre
    39. gesture
    40. ginger
    41. glove
    42. granularity
    43. hazard
    44. hours versus ours
    45. hypotheses
    46. individual
    47. jeopardy
    48. leisure
    49. lethargy
    50. lever versus liver
    51. leverage
    52. litigious
    53. Liu
    54. living
    55. logarithm
    56. longitude
    57. lose versus loose
    58. manually
    59. maximum
    60. Moby
    61. morality
    62. mortgage
    63. mundane
    64. none
    65. novel
    66. obesity
    67. onion
    68. only
    69. orthogonal
    70. oven
    71. owner
    72. pathology, pathologist
    73. pedagogue versus pedagogy and pedagogical
    74. Philippines
    75. plan
    76. police
    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