Victuals and other odd words

[marcusmarcusrc]

Stimulated by a discussion at chenoameg's WordGames, I wanted to ask people to list words whose spellings are ridiculously different than their pronunciations:

eg.
vict.ual \'vit-*l\
col.o.nel \'k*rn-*l\
Worcestershire sauce (IPA [ˈwʊstə(ɹ)ʃ(ɪ)ə(r)])

EDIT: And how could I forget
boat.swain \'bo-s-*n\
(I learned this one when I was in the Tempest)

I still can't believe that until last week I thought that "victual" and "vittle" were two different words with different pronunciations that just happened to have the same meaning. Like the years I spent assuming that there were two military ranks, colonel and kernel. Only that misconception I corrected in middle school...

Comments

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

It was quite recently for me as well. Less than sixty seconds ago, in fact.

Oh, and "lieutenant" pronounced with an "f" sound.

[desireearmfeldt]

But only in England, surely. :)

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Close. Only people from England. Which includes my mum, so I grew up not being sure about several words. (In particular, I can never remember which is the American pronunciation and which is English for "garage.")

[desireearmfeldt]

In the one linguistics class I took at MIT, my TA was Australian. When we were going over phonemes, we got to zh and he said "I don't understand why the book says this is the sound at the end of garage" and we had this long back and forth before we could get through everyone's tendancy to hear the meaning of the word rather than the sound (I say ga-RAZH, the classic English is GAH-ridge, and I think his version might have been ga-RADGE.)