Mispronounced in Your Head

Paradigm and meme for certain....I pronounce Draught in my head with a decided posh british accent.

Didn't these people read Calvin and Hobbes? Bill Watterson used at least two of those in poems.

"Although you may find it slightly macabre / we prefer your extinction to the loss of our job."

"Tigers are great / the e-pit-o-me..." Calvin doesn't quite finish the poem there, but the word is hyphenated so you know where the syllables are, and he also ends up with "dignity" so you know what it rhymes with.

When I was young I thought it was vag-in-a instead of va-gi-na.

Demesne. Knew it thanks to Archon, back in the C64 days, but was stunned and embarrassed to discover it wasn't pronounced duh-MEZ-nee.

queue. Always thought it was kwayway

"Segue" was mine, always read "say-goo" and even got the basic meaning from context but never put it together to people saying "Seg-way" like on TV until like 9th grade where I had an epiphany.

When I was down in Florida I ordered roast beef & au-jus, which they prounounced as "O'juice".

Still don't know how to pronounce "meme". Is it meHm or is it mee mee?

Marishka: MEEEEM

I was an adult before I found out that acacia wasn't ack-ack-eye-ah. I blame the short story "The Veldt" from 4th grade.

And I lived in England when I was in my 30's and that's when I learned to pronounce "draught".

I'm a visual learner, not an audio learner...

Heh! Splint Chesthair had an epi-fanny!

Epitome and hyperbole are at the top of my list. I only found out that I had epitome wrong during a presentation. Awkward!

"Segue" and "naivete." Both with long E sounds: seeg and naiveet. I never put it together that segue was segway until quite recently, in fact. I think the segway scooter came out at just the right point in my vocabulary development to mess me up on that.

And I'd still rather pronounce "quixotic" as key-ho-tic, even though no one else pronounces it that way or knows what I'm talking about.

there have been a few for me but I can't come up with them right now. :( Really enjoyed the post though!
Well- ok- I avoid using 'egregious' out loud because I know it's not pronounced like I think it is but I can't ever remember just how it IS pronounced...

Every holiday my mother (godblessher) reminds me of how amused she still is at the first time I said burlesque.

It LOOKS like Burl skew, right?

Echinecea. I thought it was a Japanese word, so I pronounced it like it was Japanese: Eh-chi-neh-ceh-ah. My friend (now husband) said, "What word are you trying to say?" We figured it out once I explained what it was and he laughed at me for like a month.
I get to keep my pride, because 1) echinecea does not sound like how it is spelled AT ALL, and 2) he pronounces a lot of things wrong. His parents are both native german speakers, so he learned some odd pronunciations as a child that sort of stuck...weirdly stuck.

I think a lot of us grew up reading a wider vocabulary than we heard spoken. I was an adult before I learned that gauge does not rhyme with dodge, and awry does not rhyme with sorry.

Hors d’œuvre was mine. Even though I had heard the word pronounced many times, I never made the connection. Always pronounced it "whores de vores" in my head. Was in my 20's when I figured it out. Myriad always gets me too, even though I know the right pronunciation, when I read it always comes out "my-raid."

"Awry" is mine.

I know how to say it and often use it in conversation but when I see it in print I always pronounce it "Aww-Ree."

Okay, I'm pretty embarrassed about this one: Seamus. I always, always thought it was "see-muss."

My mother for years believed "miniseries" was pronounced "miniz-urries" until a commercial said it out loud.

I thought infamous was pronounced in-famous until grade 9, having never heard it said out loud before then.

Internecine, I used to stress the second syllable rather than the third.

Cache, whereby I added to the "Cash" a flamboyant "Ay!".

I'm sure there are dozens of others...

I know one person who pronounced "muse" as "moose", and another who called the Peace Corps the "peace corpse".

Hors d’œuvre : I still call them Horse Doovers out of principle.

Circumference
I pronounced it "cir.cum.fear.ance".

Like the earlier commenter, mine was "awry'.

It was a word I knew, but had never seen printed apparently. As fate would have it, in high school english class, we were cycling through the class as we read from the text. The girl next to me had awry in the last sentence she read, and when she pronounced "uh rye", it clicked.

Had it been in the the following paragraph, it would have been read by me and I would have said aw-ree.

I used to pronounce "coup" like "coop," I didn't realize the p was silent.

Recently, Boehner. I had only seen it in print and thought it was pronounced... well, you know.

It works the other way too, like when you see people write about someone who had to 'tow the line', or other homonym misfitting.

I still don't know how to pronounce "infinitesimally." Is it pronounced infinite-simally? Or is there another syllable in there or something that I'm missing? And it seems to be coming up in a lot of books I've read recently.

"Genre" sticks out as one. I thought it was "jean-er."

"Corps" is one I got called out on in a middle school history presentation.

"Facade" was fay-kade for a long time.

"Forte" was also mispronounced for-tay, but that's mostly because people generally speak in incorrectly anyway.

I used to pronounce Cthulhu as (chootloo). I still do (it makes it less scary that way)

My dad says "Illinois" with the "s"

Mine was picturesque. Like @Alger, I thought "sque" was pronounced "skew". I always loved reading the the "Towards More Picturesque Speech" feature in Reader's Digest as a kid. One day I was telling my mom about something I read there, and she couldn't stop giggling at my pronunciation.

'Centrifugal' is one of mine - when reading, i pronounced it 'cen-tri-FYOO-gal'. as my mom says, i kinda put the em-PHA-sis on the wrong sy-LA-ble. it's one of those words that took me a long while to put the pronounciation together with the word. the ep-i-PHANY is a strong as great as the 'inner cringe' is bad.

'Inertia' is another one. hooked on phonics is a scam!

oh, and @julie g...i just learned how to pronounce 'Seamus' because of your comment.

I have to cop to pronouncing chaos as chay-os in my head until high school, even knowing what it meant from context. And I had a buddy stand up in front of a poetry workshop and use harbinger to rhyme with bar singer. He had no idea why everyone thought it was so funny, and when I explained it to him he thought I was kidding.

Thanks to Back to the Future, I grew up pronouncing "Gigawatts" as "Jigawatts".

Respite

Mine was 'crudites'. I thought it was crud-ites.
I got schooled by one of our cafeteria workers over this.
It's http://www.howjsay.com/index.php?word=crudites

misled...always read it as mizzled.

my dad used to read cowboy books, and i remember him laughing at me when i commented on the pack of cowboys being a pose-ay (posse). kind of makes the tough guys a little less touch..

and i always read misled as my-zled.

"Thanks to Back to the Future, I grew up pronouncing 'Gigawatts' as 'Jigawatts.'"

The "jig-a-watts" pronunciation is not incorrect, though. It's just antiquated.

I know people my age who still can't pronounce "clitoris". Even some women.

I still pronounce meme as meh meh in my head lol

The one that always makes me stop and repeat it many times in different forms is Ague (a fever (as malaria) marked by paroxysms of chills, fever, and sweating that recur at regular intervals). Is it awg, agway, ah-goo, ah-ju. This thread has now given me the tools I need to end the seemingly endless debate . . . Ah, it's A-gyou.

As someone mentioned above, the word I remember most (in concerns to not being able to pronounce) is genre. The story behind it is that when I was in grade school, we were given the assignment to start learning what research papers were. For whatever reason, we ended up only writing the introduction and conclusion paragraphs (in retrospect, it seems like that would be the hardest part). Well, I was writing mine on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (in retrospect, who thought that was a good topic for a grade schooler?). My teacher calls me up to her after we had turned in our assignment, and she goes "Little-Nic, what's a genre?"

"Uh... I dunno. Why?" I knew something was up, but I was hoping for the best.

"You used it in your paper." She wanted to nail me for plagiarizing.

"Oh!!! A gene-ray!" My Little-Nic-self exclaims feeling much more at ease. I knew what that was! But who thought to pronounce it in such a silly French way? "Well, that's grouping of books that are the same. Like she made science fiction instead of just horror!" And I go on.

Looking back on, I suppose I should be flattered that she thought I plagiarized. Regardless, I will always remember how to say "genre."

Ennui is another good one, but I have no clever story from my youth there.

That's not really interesting, that's just English being complete bullshit.

acai: Heard only by my daughter, who sympathetically related that a Brazilian friend had thrown a minor nutty over ah-kye: It's ah-sigh-EE. Whoda thunk?

Naive is not pronounced nave (Imagine my surprise when I found that out!)

debacle does not rhyme with oracle

parry does not rhyme with Larry

and for Chrissy (#29): it's IN-fini-TESS-imally

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infinitesimally

Panacea
Chelation , chelating
Just about every pre-columbian meso-american culture name, e.g. Chichen Itza.

more to follow...

Superflous
Super-Fluss

I hate when people mispronounce Italian words commonly used in English. Such as bruschetta (ch does NOT sound like Spanish ch - rather as k in this case), ciabatta (it'st not c-i-a-batta, the i is silent so just go with ç instead) etc. Yet all those who want a mispronounced bruschetta without the k sound seem to have no problem ordering their challahs where the ch doesn't sound like the Spanish ch.
And it's nearly as bad when the words from German are pronounced horrendously. There's a place called Gruene in Texas, pronounced "Green". Or all those reubens, streusels etc - if the word is from German, I keep the German pronunciation for the "eu" like in heute there.

Oh and a friend of mine annoyed me recently talking about "dax-and" ... umm, dachshund is clearly from German, so why rape it with bastard anglicized pronunciation?

Growing up in West Texas, we lived on Illinois ave. For the longest, I always pronounced it with the 's' sound at the end, presumably the way others in my redneck family did, as 'ill i noise'. Thankfully, my wife corrected me.

While in Dallas, she often heard radio broadcasters mention 'ver say les' ave, for 'Versailles'. Things are different in Texas.

In France, it's Ver-sigh. In Kentucky, it's Ver-sales.

In Italy, it's Mi-LAN. In Tennessee, it's MY-lan.

In Greece, it's ART-imus. In Kentucky, it's Ar-TEE-mus.

In 5th grade, I corrected someone as they tried to read the word "melancholy" which I knew from reading "Alice in Wonderland" but had never heard pronounced. I thought it was "mel-ANK-o-lee" and my 5th grade teacher (not a very patient person) made a very sharp, snotty comment which made me blush with shame. How was I supposed to know it was "melon-collie"?

The bus drivers on my route in Chicago retinely announced the street named for the great German thinker Goethe as "GO-thee."

For years I would leave the bus mumbling "Gerta, Gerta, Grrrrrrrrr."