“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.
ofOutside North America, people say it with the O from “gone” if it’s stressed.
“Sphere”
That pronunciation … like WTF … did word inventors just figure we had totally exhausted the sound combinations that we could splice together?!
Sounds like the linguists got drunk.
“No no no no no… iss’not a ball, issa sphhhere”
That’s one of the things that put me off learning Greek in the end. English has unwritten rules about which clusters of consonants can come at the start of a word; Greek not so much.
“Fuck”
I think adjective is the only grammar variation it doesn’t cover.
Eww there’s a fuck stain on my couch.
I think that’s a noun adjunct
How about “fuck fuck games”?
Fucking fuckers fucking fucked. Fuck!
You have no fucking clue.
Edit to add the classic: George Carlin - Usage Of The Word Fuck - YouTube
Most of the examples here are perfectly cromulent words.
Irony
Caveat
Glossolalia
“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.
“People say the word orange doesn’t rhyme with anything”
The Etymology of Orange.
:-D
Orange ( Anglo-Saxon ? English language )
Oranj. ( Slavic? European? etc language )
Naranj. ( Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian language )
Narang. ( Hindi , Sanskrit Indic language )
Narthangai. ( Tamil - South Indian language )
:-D
That’s not rhyme, that’s assonance.
Schism?
Written. Ridden.
In my dialect, written doesn’t work quite as well, probably because that double ‘t’ turns into a glottal stop.
Found the londoner
General American speaker from Ohio, actually. Bottle, though, is boddle for me. Not sure why some words get it
With them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_without_rhymes#Masculine_rhymes
I wanted to double-check, but I don’t see any other words here that have that property, so it’s probably unique!
Y is always a vowel! I don’t know why they tell children it isn’t.
A vowel is the core of a syllable. Y is not always that, as in “yes” - it works as a consonant in that word.
It’s part of a diphthong with E in that word, two or more vowels making a sound in combination.
It’s a consonant. Specifically it’s the voiced palatal approximant represented as ⟨j⟩ in IPA.
“Though”
The first two letters don’t sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.
The word Through is just cheating at Scrabble
-Eddie Izzard
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”.
80% of the letters in “queue” are unnecessary.
No, they’re demonstrating how to line up quietly.
Side note, I was a young teen when I first saw this word and it was in reference to computer things I barely grasped and had no idea. I was asking my parents what a qwe-we was because I could not for the life of me figure out how to pronounce it. It stuck with me for years until BBC content started coming to America, then it all finally made sense.
Flaccid.
Indubitably
My friend used to always say this to mean “definitely”. He was wrong, but it sounded sophisticated.
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.
Let me introduce you to the British pronunciation of the word “lieutenant”.
lieutenant (UK: /lɛfˈtɛnənt/ lef-TEN-ənt)
It used to be spelt “coronnel” in Old French and we took that pronunciation, but then we also took the updated french word “colonel” but kept the old pronunciation.
- Funny weird: gobbledygook
- Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
- Shortest weird: A
- Literally weird: weird
- Dangerously weird: Conservative
- Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
- Properly weird: FNORD
Sardoodledom
Moist
