misled

missourigal I heard this word pronounced "missle-d" on NPR of all places, in a movie review. That experience has bothered me for longer than I care to reveal. Jul 22, 2009

rolig Wait, wasn't Antietam a character in The Whyzard of Odds?

(I think wizened is standardly WIZZ-end.) Mar 6, 2009

chained_bear Wait--it isn't pronounced WHY-zend?!

Mine was intravenous. It looked like ravenous, and for good reason. And it's very much a symptom of reading and not hearing stuff pronounced. I could come up with a huge list (if I thought about it long enough) of words, particularly names of people and places, that I "misheard" for eons.

"Antietam" comes to mind... Mar 6, 2009

yarb I still pronounce it HIGH-per-BOWL in my head. Apr 8, 2008

plethora Frindley, I remember making a similar mistake when I was little. My older cousin had an NOFX t-shirt that I spent hours puzzling over. I just couldn't figure out how to pronounce such a word. Apr 7, 2008

pterodactyl Some mispronunciations from my benighted youth:

HIGH-per-BOWL (for "hyperbole")
WHY-zend (for "wizened")

I also used to pronounce "donor" as "donner" and rhyme "caste" with "paste".
Apr 7, 2008

frindley Trivet: your onyx experience reminds me of my attempts to swot up on pop culture when I was about 11 or 12 (I thought having friends would be fun, and classical music nerd that I was, this was my strategy). True to form, I read a lot; I also listened to the right radio stations. But all this was done alone and not all the connections were made. Hence I came away concluding that there was a band called "In Excess" and another band called INXS (which I pronounced "inks"). Just how I managed to avoid wholesale humiliation, I don't know. Must have realised in the nick of time! Apr 7, 2008

frindley See awry for a similar pronunciation debacle. Apr 7, 2008

arby whoever said English was logical?

TRUE DAT! Jul 19, 2007

reesetee Haha! A classic, trivet! Jul 19, 2007

trivet For me it was "oinks" aka onyx. My family prefers the pronounciation - for the hilarity. Jul 19, 2007

reesetee I agree--but then whoever said English was logical? ;-) Jul 19, 2007

uselessness I've been purposefully avoiding this conversation, but I thought fiery was pronounced "feery" until high school, when I got in a bit of a friendly dispute with a classmate about it. We finally settled by checking with the dictionary, which proved me shamefully wrong. I still think the word should be spelled firey, if it's going to be pronounced like that. Jul 19, 2007

reesetee Arby, I know someone who still pronounces "aspartame" that way. I also know someone who pronounces crudite as CREW-dite. I think it's as you say--if you see the word in print before you hear it pronounced, the tendency is to stick with how you *think* it should be pronounced. It's hard to change, even once you find out it isn't quite correct.

Jennarenn, I like dwa-dle better than the real thing. :-) Jul 19, 2007

arby That's cute! Reminds me of one of my favorite words of all time, twaddle.

*feels like Lewis Carroll making up nonsense rhymes* Jul 19, 2007

jennarenn dwa-dle. I still have to double-check it in my head. Jul 18, 2007

arby I also had a bizarre tendency to insert extra letters in words, often duplicatively so - for example I thought mutilate was spelled "mutiliate", Herculean was "Herculanean" and mnemonic was "mnemnonic". Chalk it up to my learning disability! It's a lot easier to remember how they're pronounced once I figured out how to spell them correctly! Jul 18, 2007

arby I thought of an example - and I am embarrassed to admit how old I was when I learned the "real" pronounciation - but I thought "aspartame" was pronounced "As-par-ta-MEY" instead of "AS-par-tame". Jul 18, 2007

reesetee Really? How did you pronounce it?

Sometimes I end up liking the mispronunciation better than the correct one. :-) Jul 18, 2007

jennarenn Yes! Exactly arby! Even today I find that I may not use the first word that comes to mind because I learned it in a book and I'm not 100% sure about the pronunciation. I mispronounced dawdle forever! Jul 18, 2007

arby Yeah, I hear you.

But sionnach, I also think this happens a lot when one is exceptionally well-read as a child because you see them before you hear them pronounced. I know I had several other instances of this but I am once again memfaulting on the examples. Jul 17, 2007

slumry oh-oh, I will never see this word the same way again. Every once in a while I look at a familiar word that is in the "wrong" context and I misread it. It is a bit scary. Jul 17, 2007

arby I totally made this same mistake as a child. I blame the confusing English language! Isn't misled itself some kind of backformation (or frontformation?) of led? Lead/mislead, led/misled. Jul 17, 2007

seanahan Don't worry sionnach, I was reading the other day about a dog that had been un-derfed. I wasn't sure what that meant, but it sounded painful. Then I realized it was under-fed, whoops. Feb 20, 2007

reesetee You know, I think I looked at this word the same way when first introduced to it--connecting the "misle" part somehow with "miserly." Made perfect sense to me at the time.

Families...they're the reason mocking exists. ;-) Feb 20, 2007

sionnach Probably the most embarrassing of my childhood-teenage mispronunciations. For whatever reason, I first read this as "my-zeld". This, in turn, led to the back-formation of a present tense and infinitive, naturally this would be the verb "to misle" (which I imagined to be pronounced as "myzel", with stress on the first syllable).

Of course this was too much for my family to resist - stifling their glee at my mistake, they immediately hopped on the bandwagon, adopting the non-existent "misle" as if it were a real word. So it took me years to figure out finally that I had indeed been misled, as the rest of the family secretly mocked my ignorance. I have no idea why the connection with the verb 'mislead' never occurred to me - it just never did. Feb 20, 2007