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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.
Thank the French for this one
Ah the french…alwaysbeencelebrated for it’s…excellence!
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.
This is called “semantic satiation” which are both pleasingly weird words now that I think about it…
Hip.
I’m pretty sure “Purple” stops making sense faster than others. Just wtf? Pur-pull. Prrr-plll. What is wrong with people?
look.
look…
look…
look… !
look… ?
? look ?? Is this even a real word?
While
Whyle
Whyull
Yull
Yul
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
Apparently, there’s an obsolete English word “smitham” that means (or meant) “small lumps of ore random people found.” They were exempt from taxation by English nobility so large mine owners started breaking up large chunks into “smitham” to avoid taxation. Apparently, the Duke of Devonshire put a stop to that in 1760 and the word fell out of use.
So, I think rhythm still counts as weird. Noah Webster was 2 years old in 1760 and the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t have it.
With them?
Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?
Is this universal or are there places where they pronounce it closer to its spelling?
They pronounce it phonetically in France, which is where it came from.
I meant English dialects.
Counterpoint - Bureaucracy.
I remember I was in 6th grade and the teacher made the class read a couple paragraphs of a book. She called on kids at random to read from their seat out loud for the whole class to hear, paragraph after paragraph. When it was my turn, the word “colonel” appeared, and it hadn’t been said yet in the book. Now, I had heard of a ker-nal before, but I never assumed it would be spelled that way, so when I saw this word I just thought it was something else.
I got to the word and read it out loud as cahl-uh-null and needless to say there was many a snickering to be heard. Luckily I’m not easily embarrassed so it was fine, but I thought it was odd (and still do) that people generally act like this word being said this way is a given.
Awkward is spelled awkwardly.
Gubernatorial
“Though”
The first two letters don’t sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.
It would be half-true if we hadn’t gotten rid of a letter (the thorn, which made the"th" sound)
For a long time, they used the letter “Y” instead of “th”.
That’s how we have weird relationships with old English words like “You/Thou,” and “The/Ye.”
“You” and “thou” come from different roots. They are not simply different orthographies like “ye” and “the”.
The word Through is just cheating at Scrabble
-Eddie Izzard
- Funny weird: gobbledygook
- Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
- Shortest weird: A
- Literally weird: weird
- Dangerously weird: Conservative
- Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
- Properly weird: FNORD
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.”
“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.
ofKerfluffle
Only has one “l”
Brouhaha is its twin brother!
Kovfefe?
Epicaricacy. We chose to use a German loanword instead.
Or words that came from fiction like cromulent and thagomizer.
onomatopoeia (edit) - the word should have been something akin to soundsalotlikea but no one consulted me.
noun
- The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
- The property of a word of sounding like what it represents.
- A word that sounds like what it represents, such as “gurgle” or “hiss”.
I love salubrious as it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is (health giving or healthy.)
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“Fuck”
I think adjective is the only grammar variation it doesn’t cover.
You have no fucking clue.
Edit to add the classic: George Carlin - Usage Of The Word Fuck - YouTube
Eww there’s a fuck stain on my couch.
