7 Words That Trip Up Readers

There’s an age at which kids move past being read to by their parents and begin reading books on their own. While this is a positive step in a child’s development, it also means that they’re bound to encounter words they’ve never seen or heard before. 

This is a good thing, too, but because the words are unfamiliar, kids may come up with slight mispronunciations based on a term’s appearance. (We know that many English words don’t fit standard phonetic rules.) These mispronunciations can persist into adulthood — you may go years before anyone corrects you and you realize your mistake. Here are seven examples of words that you may have been mispronouncing since childhood.

The concept of an anemone — and more specifically a sea anemone — is something you may have encountered as a child while reading books about animals. These colorful and floral-like sea creatures have a name that looks like it should be pronounced “ANN-a-moan.” But the correct pronunciation puts the stress elsewhere and has a fourth syllable to boot: The word should actually be sounded out as “uh-NEH-muh-nee.”

The word “menagerie” appears in the children’s book Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum, which is in the series of books that inspired the popular movie of a similar name. If you read it when you were younger, you may have erroneously pronounced this word with a hard “g” — “muh-NA-gurr-ee.” But the proper pronunciation has a softer “g” sound and sounds like “muh-NA-zhr-ee.”

If you ever read the popular Amelia Bedelia books back in the day, you know they’re full of hijinks and mishaps due to homophones and other wordplay. In one of them, Amelia whips up a yummy lemon meringue pie worthy of inclusion in any recipe book. But if you were a child seeing that for the first time, you may have assumed that “meringue” — the dessert topping consisting of egg whites and sugar — should be pronounced as “muh-RAIN-goo.” But don’t be fooled: It should actually be pronounced as “muh-RANG,” with a more nasal sound at the end. 

Words ending in “gue” seem to be especially tricky. “Fatigue” can be a perplexing term for a new reader, and younger readers in particular may be thrown off even further by the fact that it’s pronounced differently from similar-looking words such as “segue” (pronounced seh-gway). Avoid pronouncing it as “FAH-ti-gew” or “FAH-ti-gway.” The proper pronunciation is “fuh-TEEG” with a hard “g” at the end.

Young readers who are fond of detective mysteries such as Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys may fancy themselves as amateur sleuths — a term defined as “detective.” But be careful with how you say this word, as a new reader may mistakenly drag it out as a multiple-syllable word: “SLEH-ooth.” In reality, it should be pronounced “SLOOTH” with just a single syllable.

Children who aren’t particularly fond of reading may feel a sense of ennui, a synonym of “boredom.” They may also pronounce the French-origin word as “EH-new-ee,” which isn’t quite right. Ennui is actually pronounced “AHN-wee,” as it comes from the Old French enui, meaning “annoyance.”

You’re not alone if you pronounce “facade” as “fuh-KADE.” Just ask Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace; in a 1996 interview, Wallace said he pronounced it with a hard “k” sound well into his first semester at college. “Facade” — meaning “the front of a building” or “a false appearance” — should actually be pronounced as “fuh-SAHD.” This is because it’s derived from the Italian faccia and French façade, which both have that softer sound.