250+ Commonly Mispronounced Words in English

Non-native speakers mispronounce by the dozen every day. Even fluent speakers. Even those working in high-paying white-collar jobs.

Why have they been making these pronunciation mistakes for years, even decades. Why don’t they correct themselves?

The answer is this question: will they take corrective steps when they don’t even know they’re mispronouncing?

In this post, I’ll list correct pronunciation of more than 250 commonly-mispronounced words in English. And places. And brands.

In some of the pronunciations below, you’ll be off by just tiny bit (and that’s enough of a mistake), and therefore you’ll have to look at the pronunciations carefully to spot the mistake you’ve been making. To give an example, the correct pronunciation of the word ‘refrigerator’ is ‘ri-frij-uh-rey-ter’. However, almost everyone calls it ‘re-frij-uh-rey-ter’. Did you catch ‘ri’ vs. ‘re’?

For few pronunciations, I’ve highlighted the common mistake in red. You’ll realize that in most cases you mispronounce because you speak the word the way it is written.

Before we jump into the list, here is a brief 101 lesson on how to speak out pronunciations mentioned in the tables below. (The pronunciations in this post are in non-phonetic form, which are more intuitive than phonetic form. You can see the difference between the two through this example.)

• Each group of letters separated by the hyphen is called a syllable. For example, the pronunciation ‘re-frij-uh-rey-ter’ has five syllables. Syllables are the building blocks of pronunciation and are spoken as a unit sequentially.
• The syllables in bold need to be stressed (means they need to be said louder and longer than other syllables). For example, the syllable ‘frij’ is stressed more than other syllables while pronouncing ‘refrigerator’.
• ‘uh’ appears in almost every second pronunciation. It sounds what it looks like. I would suggest you to listen the pronunciation of few words such as ‘address’, ‘balloon’, and ‘cadet’ at dictionary.com to get a hang of ‘uh’ sound.
• When in doubt on any of the pronunciations in the tables below, type in the word in dictionary.com and listen.

Recommended post on related topic:

How to Improve Pronunciation – My Experience with 3,400+ Words?

Words whose different forms are pronounced differently

A

B

C

D

E

F-G

H

I

J-L

M

N-O

P

R

S

T

V-W

Places