'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious', made famous by Mary Poppins, is 34 letters long. The longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary is 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis' at 45 letters long. Want to improve your English speaking skills? Check out our online English courses and get the skills you need to reach your goals.However, in the past it has been disputed whether or not it is a real word - proteins are named after the chemicals involved in making them. If you want to learn to say it like a pro, you can practise this by sticking your tongue against your front teeth and breathing out repetitively. a sound which is pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the teeth ), which is not present in many other languages. This is because it is a dental fricative (i.e. So the ‘th’ sound is pretty difficult at the best of times, but it’s even harder when it’s at the end of a word. It doesn’t help that Americans and British people pronounce the word totally differently!īritish pronunciation: Skwi-ril 10. When we asked which English words that were hardest to pronounce, this one came up a lot! Gurcan, one of our agents who is originally from Istanbul, chose this as one of the most difficult words to pronounce in English. Okay, so no one can really agree on how to pronounce the word ‘year.’ If you’re a posh British person you might say ‘yur,’ if you’re from the US you might say ‘yee-er’ and then most other people in the UK will probably say ‘yeer.’ If you’re new to learning English, just pick one and stick to it. Much like ‘thorough’, the silent ‘g’ is there to trick you, but this time only ONE of the ‘g's is silent and the first ‘g’ actually makes an ‘f’ sound. The second ridiculous British name on our list is the city of Loughborough. The only exception to the rule is Cirencester. Bicester, Leicester, Gloucestershire) then you ignore the ‘cester’ and say ‘ster’ instead. While the second and less known one is 'Irish Wrist Watch', which. The general rule is that if the place name comes from the Latin word castrum (e.g. The most popular of these phrases, 'Purple Burglar Alarm', is a well-known one that often trips up anyone with a Scottish accent. The problem comes from the fact that the sauce is named after the county of “Worcestershire” and British people ignore half the syllables in the names of their counties. WorcestershireĪh Worcestershire, the infamous sauce that no one knows how to pronounce. I found 'überqueren' a funny word to pronounce when I learned it a while ago, also when I was in highschool I really liked the word 'für' and 'Kino'. Whereas in Spanish ‘r’s are alveolar (rolled), the ‘r’ that's repeated in murderer is a lot softer and a lot harder to say. One of our Spanish followers, Monica, chose ‘murderer’ as one of the most difficult words to pronounce because of the multiple ‘r’ sounds. In fact, you might find that you have to practise this sound combination quite a lot until you can say words like ‘partly’ ‘hardly’ and ‘smartly’ with ease. So ‘exactly’ might not look too difficult but there’s something about the combination of the ‘t’ and ‘l’ sounds that causes new English speakers a lot of trouble. To make matters worse, this word is also pronounced differently by English speakers in America to those in the UK- making it even more difficult!Īmerican pronunciation: ther-ow 3. With a silent ‘g’ and an excessive amount of vowels ‘thorough’ can confuse even the most experienced English speakers. One of our Instagram followers, Abdulla from UAE, chose this as one of the trickiest English words because of the multiple vowel sounds, and we have to agree! Okay, so this is a difficult one even for English people. We asked our Instagram followers, as well as our students and English teachers, which words they struggled with the most when they first started learning English. That’s why we’ve created a list of some of the hardest English words to help you learn how to say them correctly. With silent letters, weird spellings and sounds borrowed from dozens of different languages, English words can be pretty difficult to pronounce.
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