Top ten words with the most difficult pronunciations are revealed

If you’ve ever run across a friend’s name or had trouble ordering your food, you’re not alone. Irish names, foreign food and Americanizations are among the words we find most difficult to pronounce, according to a study.

Based on Google search results, the investigation found that the most difficult name of all is Aoife, pronounced ‘ee-fa’, which generated 111,000 searches over the course of the past year. The times reports.

Saoirse, pronounced ‘sur-sha’, ranked second, while third was omicron, which has at least two common pronunciations in use: ‘om-my-kron’ and ‘om-uh-kron’.

Then comes Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, which is pronounced ‘keev’ in Ukrainian.

English-speaking countries have traditionally referred to the city as ‘key-ev’, like chicken ‘kyiv’, but a campaign since 2018 prefers it to sound like ‘kee-yiv’ or ‘keev’.

Finishing off the top five is the Brazilian superfruit açaí – pronounced ‘ah-sah-ee’ – the Brazilian superfruit, followed by two more Irish names, Niamh and Siobhan, pronounced ‘neev’ and ‘shi-vawn’ respectively, also as gyros -‘yee-ros’-, which is a kind of kebab.

Another commonly mispronounced name is the Vietnamese surname Nguyen, typically said ‘n-win’.

We are also confused by Americanizations such as the word schedule, which ranks tenth in the study.

The confusion may be because there are two common pronunciations: ‘shed-yool’ and ‘sked-yool’, with the former being the traditional English version and the latter being the American one.

Slotbox’s Lee Beardsley told The Times: “This research could highlight how many of us have been mispronouncing everyday words without realizing it, and even worse, it highlights our mispronunciation of names.”

“You can also see the influence of current events, with many Brits wanting to find the correct pronunciation of Kyiv and omicron to engage them in a topical conversation.”