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This is a set of lists of English personal and place names having spellings that are counterintuitive to their pronunciation because the spelling does not accord with conventional pronunciation associations. Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages.
Many words have lost phonemes (consonant or vowel sounds) somewhere in their histories. Sometimes, this changes the standard of pronunciation. For example, the silent k at the start of many words in the English language was originally pronounced. However, a word is mispronounced if a phoneme is omitted when it is not normally pronounced that way.
Not all words in this list are acceptable in Scrabble tournament games. Scrabble tournaments around the world use their own sets of words from selected dictionaries that might not contain all the words listed here. Qi is the most commonly played word in Scrabble tournaments, [10] and was added to the official North American word list in 2006. [11]
In fact, the first syllable is pronounced "HOW" or "HOUSE," like the shelter people live in. The street and the city were named in honor of different men, William Houstoun and Sam Houston ...
A spelling pronunciation is the pronunciation of a word according to its spelling when this differs from a longstanding standard or traditional pronunciation. Words that are spelled with letters that were never pronounced or that were not pronounced for many generations or even hundreds of years have increasingly been pronounced as written, especially since the arrival of mandatory schooling ...
Some English words can be written with diacritics; these are mostly loanwords, usually from French. [14] As vocabulary becomes naturalised, there is an increasing tendency to omit the accent marks, even in formal writing. For example, rôle and hôtel originally had accents when they were borrowed into English, but now the accents are almost ...
Compound words are often simplified in pronunciation, while their spelling remains the same. For example, cupboard and breakfast were once pronounced as written, but were then simplified over time. The words forehead and waistcoat have largely reverted to their spelling pronunciations, but were once pronounced *forrid and *weskit, respectively.
This is a sublist of List of irregularly spelled English names. These common suffixes have the following regular pronunciations, which are historic, well established and etymologically consistent. However, they may be counterintuitive, as their pronunciation is inconsistent with the usual phonetics of English. -b(o)rough and -burgh – / b ər ə /