queue
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.
It’s a Q: a bunch of vowels are lined up behind it!
God damn it. That’s good.
Thanks, stole it myself!
Thank the French for this one
oiseau – for when consonants are overrated. (it means bird).
Eau - for when consonants are unnecessary
How is that pronounced?
wazo
You can toss it into google translate and listen to audio. It would probably be better than any attempted typing I can do here.
Wiktionary has a lot of audio transcriptions too: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oiseau
Ah the french…alwaysbeencelebrated for it’s…excellence!
I knew an English speaking American born well off white dude that pronounced this as “kway”. It was the most annoying thing that came out of his mouth besides all of the bragging and “I’m smarter than everyone” attitude.
pulchritudinous
such an ugly word, yet it means “beautiful”
It’s so similar to “putrid”
and “sepulchre”
Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.
It’s from a political cartoon depicting a corrupt districting plan as a salamander.
A plan proposed by a man named Elbridge Gerry.
I always thought it sounded like Jerry Seinfeld between takes/shoots just hanging around the set. Not doing anything. Just ignoring everything around him. He’s just gerrymandering around the studio.
Gerry meandering
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been… are all the same word.
Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:
Same with “go” and “went”.
I god.
I came
“To be” averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. “To have” usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.
Or not to be…
Or not to have…
“To be” being highly irregular il a common feature of a lot of Indo-European languages. But there’s worse. In Spanish, “ser” and “estar” both mean “to be”, but have wildly different meanings and cannot be substituted for one another.
“be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.
Not in Turkish. It is “olmak” but the actual “to be” as it is used in “I am, they were, etc.” is, now unused “imek”. it has become a suffix and it is completely regular. Just i + person suffix.
Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.
For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”
And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).
A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.
Was going to reply that, it’s not that Russian doesn’t have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.
But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don’t know of any other language where verbs are gendered.
And it has multiple meanings. “you are sick” can mean that you’re currently sick but can also mean that you’re a sick person. Other languages usually differentiate the verb in those two cases
I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.
Removed by mod
I really only know of this word because of Scott Manley
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
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!
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
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”
That’s not rhyme, that’s assonance.
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
With them?
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.
Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?
Counterpoint - Bureaucracy.
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.
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.
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.
Akimbo
It’s an honest-to-goodness English word and not derived from French, Latin, Greek or anything else, like a lot of the words here. Yes, it looks like it might be from an African language, but it’s a squashed form of “in keen bow” meaning “well bent” or “crooked”.
I always assumed it was a loan word from Japanese. TIL.
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…
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?
In scots gaelic purple is ‘purpaidh’ pronounced “pur-pee” which is equally as strange imo
Bowl
Hip.
While
Whyle
Whyull
Yull
Yul
Bradey
“Though”
The first two letters don’t sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.
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.
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
Awkward is spelled awkwardly.
Gubernatorial
This word makes me physically angry. Why b? Why not governatorial? It is from the same word. Government, governor, etc. I know hsitorically bs and vs change places a lot, beta in Greek is pronounced veta but just pick either v or b god damn it!
- Funny weird: gobbledygook
- Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
- Shortest weird: A
- Literally weird: weird
- Dangerously weird: Conservative
- Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
- Properly weird: FNORD
Biweekly.
It means twice a week.
Or, it means once every other week.
Good luck.
I usually say “semiweekly” to mean twice per week. I also say “semimonthly” to mean twice per month (24 times per year) as opposed to “biweekly” (26 times per year).
This is the only word I know of whose meaning can be redefined by majority consensus.
Case in point, my workplace wanted a bi-weekly committee meeting for our team to work on stuff over a zoom call. I asked what days these meetings would be held and they all agreed “Just Thursdays”. When I tried to argue that a bi-weekly meeting necessarily means that there must be two distinct dates per week, they all agreed that bi-weekly obviously means every other Thursday and that I didn’t understand what the word bi-weekly meant 😒
The fact that American English doesn’t have the word ‘fortnightly’ is incredibly confusing on every level.
Biweekly is every two weeks (fortnightly)
Semi-weekly is twice a week.
Same rule as bimonthly and semimonthly.
I don’t know about weirdest, but here are some quirky words:
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inflammable means the same thing as flammable
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“the/a”. If you’re a native English speaker, like me, it probably doesn’t look unusual. I was listening to a lecture series on linguistics and it wasn’t until then that I learned that most languages out there don’t have a mandatory definite/indefinite article. In most languages, if you want to say “cat”, you can say “cat”. English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat” – the presence of an article to indicate whether the thing you’re talking about is unique or not. That’s an unusual feature for a language to have. It’s baked into how I think, but a lot of the world just doesn’t work that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Crosslinguistic_variation
Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages (only the definite article)[citation needed], and Polynesian languages; however, they are formally absent from many of the world’s major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, many Turkic languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages, the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases.
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“data”. It used to normally be the plural of datum, but within living memory has normally become a mass noun, like “water” or “air” or “love”. It’s not the only word to do this, but it’s unusual.
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“deer”. It’s not the only word to do this either, but it’s one of a small number of words in English where the plural and singular form can be (and traditionally, needed to be) identical. Today, it looks like regular forms of these are increasingly being considered acceptable, at least in American English (“deers”, “fishes”, etc).
fishes
Fun fact! Fishes means multiple types of different species of fish
Japanese doesn’t have articles or account for number with something as simple as an s (some words could take -tachi or -ra as a plural marker, but not all, and often it isn’t even used when plural unless there’s specific need for it). Often, we learn something is plural by other inference or a number given. My wife has a hell of a time with articles and the like when trying to speak English.
I’m also learning modern hebrew (Arabic’s writing system seemed a bit much plus all the dialects vs written MSA, so that’s now a later goal) and they only have definite articles so the indefinite is the default state.
Although using “data” as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating “[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands” which is just so cringe!
Edit: typos
English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat”
Generally true but not for abstract nouns and mass nouns: “The water’s warm”, “I’d like a water”, “Water is a liquid”.
PS. It’s called the zero article.
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