pulchritudinous
such an ugly word, yet it means “beautiful”
It’s so similar to “putrid”
and “sepulchre”
I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.
That looks like something Snoop Dogg would say.
Akimbo
It’s an honest-to-goodness English word and not derived from French, Latin, Greek or anything else, like a lot of the words here. Yes, it looks like it might be from an African language, but it’s a squashed form of “in keen bow” meaning “well bent” or “crooked”.
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_without_rhymes#Masculine_rhymes
I wanted to double-check, but I don’t see any other words here that have that property, so it’s probably unique!
Schism?
Written. Ridden.
In my dialect, written doesn’t work quite as well, probably because that double ‘t’ turns into a glottal stop.
Found the londoner
General American speaker from Ohio, actually. Bottle, though, is boddle for me. Not sure why some words get it
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.
“People say the word orange doesn’t rhyme with anything”
That’s not rhyme, that’s assonance.
With them?
Y is always a vowel! I don’t know why they tell children it isn’t.
A vowel is the core of a syllable. Y is not always that, as in “yes” - it works as a consonant in that word.
It’s part of a diphthong with E in that word, two or more vowels making a sound in combination.
It’s a consonant. Specifically it’s the voiced palatal approximant represented as ⟨j⟩ in IPA.
Awkward is spelled awkwardly.
Pick any of them, and repeat it over and over again. It’ll quickly become the weirdest word in the language, at least for a while.
Bowl
I’m pretty sure “Purple” stops making sense faster than others. Just wtf? Pur-pull. Prrr-plll. What is wrong with people?
In scots gaelic purple is ‘purpaidh’ pronounced “pur-pee” which is equally as strange imo
Bradey
While
Whyle
Whyull
Yull
Yul
Gubernatorial
This word makes me physically angry. Why b? Why not governatorial? It is from the same word. Government, governor, etc. I know hsitorically bs and vs change places a lot, beta in Greek is pronounced veta but just pick either v or b god damn it!
- Funny weird: gobbledygook
- Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
- Shortest weird: A
- Literally weird: weird
- Dangerously weird: Conservative
- Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
- Properly weird: FNORD
I don’t know about weirdest, but here are some quirky words:
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inflammable means the same thing as flammable
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“the/a”. If you’re a native English speaker, like me, it probably doesn’t look unusual. I was listening to a lecture series on linguistics and it wasn’t until then that I learned that most languages out there don’t have a mandatory definite/indefinite article. In most languages, if you want to say “cat”, you can say “cat”. English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat” – the presence of an article to indicate whether the thing you’re talking about is unique or not. That’s an unusual feature for a language to have. It’s baked into how I think, but a lot of the world just doesn’t work that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Crosslinguistic_variation
Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages (only the definite article)[citation needed], and Polynesian languages; however, they are formally absent from many of the world’s major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, many Turkic languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages, the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases.
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“data”. It used to normally be the plural of datum, but within living memory has normally become a mass noun, like “water” or “air” or “love”. It’s not the only word to do this, but it’s unusual.
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“deer”. It’s not the only word to do this either, but it’s one of a small number of words in English where the plural and singular form can be (and traditionally, needed to be) identical. Today, it looks like regular forms of these are increasingly being considered acceptable, at least in American English (“deers”, “fishes”, etc).
fishes
Fun fact! Fishes means multiple types of different species of fish
Japanese doesn’t have articles or account for number with something as simple as an s (some words could take -tachi or -ra as a plural marker, but not all, and often it isn’t even used when plural unless there’s specific need for it). Often, we learn something is plural by other inference or a number given. My wife has a hell of a time with articles and the like when trying to speak English.
I’m also learning modern hebrew (Arabic’s writing system seemed a bit much plus all the dialects vs written MSA, so that’s now a later goal) and they only have definite articles so the indefinite is the default state.
Although using “data” as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating “[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands” which is just so cringe!
Edit: typos
English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat”
Generally true but not for abstract nouns and mass nouns: “The water’s warm”, “I’d like a water”, “Water is a liquid”.
PS. It’s called the zero article.
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Biweekly.
It means twice a week.
Or, it means once every other week.
Good luck.
This is the only word I know of whose meaning can be redefined by majority consensus.
Case in point, my workplace wanted a bi-weekly committee meeting for our team to work on stuff over a zoom call. I asked what days these meetings would be held and they all agreed “Just Thursdays”. When I tried to argue that a bi-weekly meeting necessarily means that there must be two distinct dates per week, they all agreed that bi-weekly obviously means every other Thursday and that I didn’t understand what the word bi-weekly meant 😒
I usually say “semiweekly” to mean twice per week. I also say “semimonthly” to mean twice per month (24 times per year) as opposed to “biweekly” (26 times per year).
The fact that American English doesn’t have the word ‘fortnightly’ is incredibly confusing on every level.
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As a native speaker of language that is spelled the way its written. I can say that most of them are weird.
Eye.
We take it for granted now, but I’m sure we all questioned the word at one point in our lives, the shortest word guaranteed to fool any child who is an intuitive spelling pro if they don’t already know the word’s spelling.
Fun anecdote, in DC the east/west streets are named A St, B St, C St, and so on. But not i street. Capital i could be confused with L Street, so all the signs are written “Eye St”
You’d think at that point they’d just name all the streets like would be appreciated.
Eye Street does live up to its name, it is the most interesting street.
I was just thinking this, but with the word “one”. And also “two”
By all accounts, “one” should rhyme with “stone”, but bear in mind that we also have “done” which is pretty close, as well as “gone” which is pretty out-there by comparison. (This suggests the compromise pronunciation of “scone” should be “scun”, but on the other hand…)
There’s also that in some accents / dialects, the word “own” fills that particular pronunciation niche, necessitating an alternative pronunciation for the number.
The theory is that a non-standard regional pronunciation is the, uh, one that caught on everywhere else.
Fun fact about “two”: It’s the “w” making the vowel sound, and the “o” is silent (compare Latin “duo”). Even more strangely, it’s “w” that makes the vowel sound in “who” as well! It was originally spelled “hwo” until all “hw” words were forced to conform to all the other modifiers where the h goes second. It’s also hwy / why the h sounds out first in old-fashioned pronunciations of words like whip / hwip.
And eight.
Epicaricacy. We chose to use a German loanword instead.
Or words that came from fiction like cromulent and thagomizer.
For others about to look up the word:
Epicaricacy is Rejoicing at or derivation of pleasure from the misfortunes of others
In its defence
Schadenfraude is a really fun word to say.
Absolutely, certainly when shouting with a harsh voice.
Also to sing about
Miscellaneous, no one that isn’t a native English speaker knows how to pronounce that word
Acknowledge, no one that isn’t a native English speaker knows how to write that word
Non-native English speaker here. Disagree.
I’m one myself and have been tested as being fully bilingual, so it doesn’t come from a bad place (just to be clear that I’m not laughing at the expense of non native speakers).
Oh I didn’t take it as such 🙂 I just disagree.
I sometimes think that native speakers are worse at spelling.
You give too much credit to natives on writing proficiency. Neither of those are particularly hard words.
How about segue?
