English is hard to spell. Nevertheless, most of us get by with a combination of some basic phonetics, habits from school, and occasional trips to the dictionary ( and learning from a few embarrassing mistakes along the way ) . English has the most difficult spelling of any Western language ( and, after all, we have spelling bees, which are nearly unique to the United States ) . This is partly due to the mongrel nature of the language, which evolved from a combination of Anglo - Saxon ( also known as Old English ) , Latin, Old Norse, and the Anglo - French of the dominant class following the Norman Conquest in 1066.
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This motley jumble of languages, plus time ( we won’t even get into the great vowel shift ) , has made English spelling confusing and frequently counterintuitive. It also makes it hard to pronounce many words confidently and correctly, due to the inconsistent relationship spelling has with pronunciation. Consider the various ways we create the \f\ sound in cough, photo, and giraffe, or the \sh\ sound in special, issue, vicious, and portion, or the \k\ sound in tack, quite, and shellac, and how we pronounce the "o" in do, core, lock, and bone, or the "ea" in lead, ocean, idea, and early. And, of course, there’s cough, rough, though, bough, and through.
Let’s look at some words that sound quite different from what one might expect from the way that they are spelled. A few of these are fairly common words, but most are more frequently encountered by reading than from spoken English. Even avid readers with big vocabularies can be surprised by how some words sound. One thing is for sure: if you pronounce these tricky words correctly, it shows that you also know what they mean.
Preternatural
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Fifteen words even you might be mispronouncing.
Introduction
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Photo: scanrail
English is hard to spell. Nevertheless, most of us get by with a combination of some basic phonetics, habits from school, and occasional trips to the dictionary ( and learning from a few embarrassing mistakes along the way ) . English has the most difficult spelling of any Western language ( and, after all, we have spelling bees, which are nearly unique to the United States ) . This is partly due to the mongrel nature of the language, which evolved from a combination of Anglo - Saxon ( also known as Old English ) , Latin, Old Norse, and the Anglo - French of the dominant class following the Norman Conquest in 1066.
This motley jumble of languages, plus time ( we won’t even get into the great vowel shift ) , has made English spelling confusing and frequently counterintuitive. It also makes it hard to pronounce many words confidently and correctly, due to the inconsistent relationship spelling has with pronunciation. Consider the various ways we create the \f\ sound in cough, photo, and giraffe, or the \sh\ sound in special, issue, vicious, and portion, or the \k\ sound in tack, quite, and shellac, and how we pronounce the "o" in do, core, lock, and bone, or the "ea" in lead, ocean, idea, and early. And, of course, there’s cough, rough, though, bough, and through.
Let’s look at some words that sound quite different from what one might expect from the way that they are spelled. A few of these are fairly common words, but most are more frequently encountered by reading than from spoken English. Even avid readers with big vocabularies can be surprised by how some words sound. One thing is for sure: if you pronounce these tricky words correctly, it shows that you also know what they mean.
Preternatural
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Photo: Rawpixel
\pree - ter - NATCH - uh - rul\ play
Preternatural means “extraordinary” ( “a preternatural ability” ) or “inexplicable by other means” ( a synonym of “psychic” ) . It comes from the Medieval Latin word praeternaturalis, formed from the Latin words praeter naturam, meaning “beyond nature. ” In a sense, preternatural is a fancy way of saying “supernatural. ”
Unlike more common words like president, present, and pressure, preternatural is pronounced with a long \e\ sound ( \EE\ ) in the first syllable.
Primer
There are two primers: the older word, meaning “a small book” or, more broadly, “a short informative piece of writing, ” is pronounced \PRIMM - er\, while the word meaning “an initial coat of paint” is pronounced \PRY - mer\. In British English, both words are pronounced with the long \i\ sound ( \EYE\ ) .
Victuals
VIT - ulz\ play
Victuals means “supplies of food” or “provisions, ” and comes from the Latin word victualis meaning “of nourishment. ” It went through French before it came into English, and the pronunciation was presumably established based on the French spelling vitaille before the spelling was changed to better reflect the Latin root of the word. Vittle is given in our dictionaries as a variant of victuals, but the later learned spelling is the preferred one
Conch
KAHNK\ play
This could go either way, since there are two ways to pronounce ch - in English: the more familiar \CHUH\ sound like ranch, rich, and paunch as well as the hard \k\ sound, as in tech and epoch. Although we give \KAHNCH\ as a variant for conch, \KAHNK\ is the more common pronunciation.
Colonel
KER - nul\ play
Another case of respelling after the pronunciation was established. The French took the word colonnello from Italian—it comes from the word for “column” and referred to the leader of a column of soldiers—but the French altered the spelling to coronel. Such substitutions in different languages are not unknown between liquid consonants. The word came to English from French in the mid - 1500s, but by the mid - 1600s, the etymologically “correct” ( but by now confusing ) spelling colonel was adopted in both French and English. Interestingly, the French later also altered their pronunciation, and today pronounce the \l\, whereas English stubbornly remained with the original \r\.
