British English - lieutenant is pronounced “Lef-tennant”
Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.
I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.
I really only know of this word because of Scott Manley
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.
pulchritudinous
such an ugly word, yet it means “beautiful”
It’s so similar to “putrid”
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been… are all the same word.
Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:
“Cwm”
One of a few words that use W as a vowel. (This is how the word “Pwn” works too)
A Welshman about to traverse a steep-sided hollow at the head of a valley: “Oh baby I’m gonna cwm!”
All I heard was “head” ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
As a native speaker of language that is spelled the way its written. I can say that most of them are weird.
I would love to see a language that isn’t spelled the way it’s written
https://mastodon.nu/@jdskog/113021722561159823
I mean this.
I was joking. I think you meant “spelled the way it is pronounced,” since technically all words are spelled the way they are written haha
“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.
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
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.
Moist