For those who find travel stressful, feeling like an outsider is just one of the worries. If you’re in search of the right train platform and can’t parse the signs, you want to know how to pronounce the name of your destination correctly, especially to anyone kind enough to help out a tourist. Languages around the world use vastly different pronunciations from standard English. Accent marks and unfamiliar letter pairings can confuse travelers, as can city names that don’t match what Americans know them by. Though learning a new language is difficult, practicing local pronunciation is an important step for visiting a new place. 

The largest city in Hungary is an excellent tourist destination for history nerds because of its prewar classical architecture. The city used to be split into Buda and Pest by the Danube River, but they came together as the official capital in 1873. The final syllable of the city’s name has a slight trick to it: The “s” should actually be pronounced as an “sh,” so it sounds like “booda-pesht.” 

Even though it’s been an active metropolis since the Middle Ages, confusion persists about how to refer to Scotland’s capital city. Instead of saying “edin-berg,” locals drop the final “g” and end with an aspirated “h.” If you can’t pull off an authentic Scottish brogue, practice “ed-in-bur-uh” a few times before talking to a local. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the French language, the abundance of double vowels and double consonants might give you pause. An English speaker might pronounce Marseille, the capital of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, as “mar-sell” or “mar-sell-ee,” but approaching this phonetically is a mistake. The “ei” in the town name is a diphthong, which is two vowel sounds meant to be pronounced together. The double “l,” followed by the “e,” is not pronounced at all. When you visit the South of France, take a stop in the beautiful city of “marsay.” 

This British town is in the county of Leicestershire in England. The name comes from the Old English name of the town, written in 924 CE as Ligera ceastre, which translates to “city of the Ligore people.” In modern English, the middle section of the word is essentially just for show. To sound like a born-and-bred Briton, you have to say “lester.” 

The largest city in China is home to eye-popping skyscrapers contrasted with beautiful historic places, such as the Yuyuan Garden, dating back to the 16th-century Ming dynasty. English speakers tend to pronounce the first “a” as “ay”: “shayng-hi.” Instead, you should pronounce the city name as “shahng-hi.” 

Even in English-speaking countries, city names are subject to the various English accents around the world. Brisbane is the capital city of Queensland, popular with visitors because of the Brisbane Riverwalk and many national parks. Instead of saying “briz-bay-n,” Australians elide the “a” out of the word. Aussies will thank you for pronouncing it  “bris-bn” — no final vowel necessary. 

This beautiful city in Thailand is known for its various beach resorts and historic Buddhist temples. In English, we pronounce “ph” as an “f” sound, but that doesn’t apply here. Instead, let the “h” stay silent, and tell the locals how glad you are to be visiting “poo-ket.” 

This city in Spain is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its importance to Christian, Islamic, and Jewish history. The city was called Toletum in the days of the Roman Empire, which led to the modern name, Toledo — a name also found in five U.S. states and other countries around the world. If you’re visiting the Gothic cathedral in Toledo, Spain, make sure to soften the “e” and say “toh-leh-doh.” 

Finnish and other Scandinavian languages are notoriously tricky for English speakers. Their spelling structure and pronunciation are very different from those in English, since they evolved from Old Norse and North Germanic languages. Though Porvoo looks like it should be simple, the double vowels do not follow English-speaking trends. Say “por-vo” instead of “por-voo.”

The English language is always evolving, and dictionaries need to be updated frequently to keep up with changing times. But not all neologisms earn a permanent place in the dictionary — their lexicographical immortality is entirely dependent on meeting a set of certain criteria.

To learn more about how words get added to the dictionary, we spoke with senior editor Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster. As a lexicographer, Brewster plays a key role in deciding which terms make it into the dictionary each year and which fall by the wayside. Here’s a look at what she had to say in our interview, which has been edited for clarity.

Brewster: Words have to meet three criteria: a significant amount of evidence of a word in use, in a variety of publications and contexts, over a period of time. All of those three criteria are intentionally vague. Every word meets those criteria, but in a different way. For example, the word “COVID-19” was entered only 34 days after the word had been coined. It was the fastest that any word has ever been entered in a Merriam-Webster dictionary. 

The amount of time we let a word germinate and show that it’s really an official member of the language is more like five or even 10 years, and there are plenty of words where it’s significantly longer. But that amount of time has been shrinking because words are now able to proliferate and show widespread use geographically in an amount of time that keeps getting shorter and shorter.

Brewster: For the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary, we usually do two updates a year. COVID-19 [the time period] got a special edition; it was a special release just for COVID-related words. I think there were maybe about 50 terms that got in for that; that’s very unusual. It just seemed pretty urgent, as there were a lot of words that people were having questions about, and so we made an exception to the usual schedule.

But in general, it’s usually two updates a year that we do, and there are usually several hundred words that are being updated [or added]. We could just put in one word at a time, but that would be a very clunky, impractical sort of process because any new addition to the dictionary is likely to have implications on other parts of the dictionary. Anytime we use a word in defining text or in an example sentence [in a new usage], that use of that word also has to be entered in the dictionary. A dictionary is necessarily circular. Everything in it has to be defined by something else in it.

So we do not make just one-off changes. We are able to correct typos, but in general, we do what we call our releases and will be working on a whole batch of words. Sometimes they relate to a particular topic, but more often they’re from all over the lexical field.

Brewster: We’re constantly doing both. Any definition that is in one of our dictionaries is possibly in need of revision at any time. We’re constantly examining these things. I have notes that I’ve made to myself to see if this new meaning of this word is ready [for an update] yet, and I will return to it and see if it is or not. We’re also examining words that come up because we can see what people search for at Merriam-Webster.com and [decide] whether we enter it or not.

Then we also have different resources that we use to see new vocabulary that’s kind of percolating in the language. It really just varies. As a definer, we’re always updating definitions and adding new definitions. Depends on what kind of project we’re working on and what words we’re coming across and that sort of thing. Sometimes an editor is working on a group defining project [meaning working on a specific category of words], and sometimes they’re just going through and examining the list of words that we’re tracking to see if they’re fully established yet.

Brewster: For a long time, it was every 10 years that we would do a new edition of the Collegiate Dictionary. But the 11th edition came out in 2003, so this was a much longer period of time. That’s just because of practical matters regarding the publishing industry, really. We were very busy updating the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary, and we also spent years producing another very new kind of dictionary called Merriam-Webster’s Advanced Learner’s English Dictionary; it’s a monolingual dictionary for non-native English speakers. 

And we make updates; the 11th Collegiate actually had regular [printed] updates being made all the time. And the 12th Collegiate will also be updated. But a new edition means cover to cover, every entry is potentially open to being reexamined. Really broad changes can be made to the style of the dictionary.

Brewster: For the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary, we do not usually remove words because we don’t need to. There are no space constraints. The reason for removing words from a print dictionary is that you really want it to be affordable and relatively portable. The 12th edition is actually a bigger book. The idea of it being portable and affordable has shifted a little bit, because these days, people who are likely to buy a print dictionary are going to be interested in the object itself. It’s not the kind of thing people are going to be toting around in their backpacks with them. But a print dictionary is necessarily subject to space constraints and you can only fit so much between the covers, so we do remove words in that case. 

Most of the time, words that get removed are related to outdated technologies. The word “wagonette” was a word that was removed between the 11th and 12th Collegiate editions. Nobody rides in a wagonette anymore, and it’s not even a word that you’re likely to come across in old literature. We wanted to keep words that you’re still likely to come across in 19th-century literature, which is still widely read. But we didn’t need to include words that were very obscure, that were only used by a limited number of botanists, for example. 

Sometimes we will systematically make a change in how we are covering vocabulary. So, we might decide that a term that currently has its own entry is now better addressed in an entry for a related word. I remember at one point, we had the word “color film” and the word “black and white film.” They each got their own entry. They don’t need to both have their own entries now, right? You can cover color film and black and white film in the entry for “film,” and that is an adequate way to cover it.

Brewster: Our perspective is that if you come across one of these hateful, terrible words, you should be able to understand what it means coming from a neutral, authoritative source like a dictionary. And we are very careful to include usage information that tells the reader: This is deeply offensive, or this term is very disparaging.

We see it very much as our job to include those words because they’re established, but then also to give really solid information to the reader about the qualities that these words carry and how they’re likely to be received. We will provide the information for you to do what you decide to do, knowing what you need to know to make a decision about whether to use that word or not.

Brewster: We’re constantly monitoring all of the words. That’s just a huge part of being a lexicographer. We have these files that have been going for more than a century where we’re watching words come and go. Sometimes they never really become established, so then there are just these relics in our files that you think, “Oh, well, that word was used for a little while and it never made it in.” 

You can look at our slang page on Merriam-Webster.com, and these words are not in the official dictionary, but they are treated specifically as new slang. That’s a good source to see what words may qualify. We also have a feature called “Words We’re Watching,” where we’ll write articles about new words that haven’t yet met our criteria for entry. A lot of these then go on to be entered, and so the article will be updated to say this word was entered into the dictionary at this particular time.

Brewster: Sure, people can and do email us, and they can also contact us on social media and say, “Hey, you should really put this one in.” These things do get read, but you won’t always get a reply. But regionalisms take longer to get in because we don’t want to define regionalisms that are still very much restricted to their region. So it’s not that a regionalism isn’t a word; it can be a word a long time before it gets into the dictionary. But we aim to cover words that are established more broadly in the language.

Brewster: Well, openings don’t come up all that often, but keep an eye out. As far as being qualified for the position, you need to have a great facility with English — since we do English-language dictionaries. You also have to have a really good feel for language, and you have to be OK with spending hours and hours and hours analyzing what any particular word means.

My own background is in linguistics and philosophy, but any background is useful because the vocabulary of the language covers any field. So having a math background could be helpful, or having a sociology background can be useful. It’s really the mind that is drawn to analyzing language, and that is interested in pulling words apart.

Brewster: I do like the word “noctivagant,” meaning “going about at night.” Sometimes I talk to schools, and it’s a word that kids can pull apart by its parts to understand what it means. So I think that’s a fun word.

Our modern English alphabet, consisting of 26 letters, is sometimes taken for granted. But if someone were to say that the letter “a” was no longer the first letter in the sequence, the outcry and ensuing chaos would be swift and widespread. For all of us, “a” naturally comes first — in the alphabet, in school grades, and in expressions such as “A to Z” and “A-list.” Even the word “alphabet” comes from the Greek alphabetos, itself from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the alphabet. 

But why is “a” the first letter, and not “b,” or “m,” or any other? After all, we don’t have to stick to an established sequence — QWERTY keyboards do away with alphabetic order altogether, and we use them every day. Here we take a voyage of discovery spanning thousands of years to find out how our alphabet evolved, where the letter “a” comes from, and why it is first in our alphabet. 

The evolution of our modern alphabet begins somewhere between 1700 and 1500 BCE on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Here, a group of Semitic-speaking people, quite likely the Phoenicians, developed a writing system that would change the world: a streamlined alphabet of 22 letters that was vastly more efficient and easier to learn than pictographic symbols such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, which required hundreds of individual symbols.  

This new system of letters was highly practical and soon spread across the region. But the Phoenician alphabet was what linguists call an “abjad” — it contained only consonants and no vowels. Readers were expected to supply the vowel sounds from context, which worked fairly well for Semitic languages in which vowels were largely predictable from the consonant root of a word. But it didn’t work so well for other languages. 

So, when the Greeks encountered the alphabet sometime around 1000 BCE, they recognized its potential but had to spruce it up a little: They added vowels. The result was the world’s first true alphabet, one with both consonants and vowels. This new, refined alphabet became the foundation for Latin (via the Romans), which became the basis for virtually every alphabet used in Europe today, including ours. 

The modern English alphabet is more accurately called the Germanic alphabet. It developed from the Latin alphabet to be used in English, German, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, and related languages. Other alphabets that developed from Latin include the Romance (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.), Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak, etc.), Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian), and Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Hungarian, etc.) alphabets.

Like most letters, the letter “a” began life as a picture — its roots can be traced to an Egyptian hieroglyph that represents an ox’s head. In early Semitic writing, this symbol was turned into the letter aleph — the ancestor of “a” — which also took the form of an ox’s head. Fascinatingly, the ox can still be seen today. If you take the modern capital letter “A” and turn it upside down, you can clearly see an ox’s head with its two horns. 

When the Greeks adopted aleph, they used it to represent the vowel “a” and renamed it alpha. They also changed the letter’s orientation: Where the Phoenicians drew the letter with the ox’s nose pointing sideways, the Greeks remodeled it on geometrical lines and rotated it upright, so it stood on its horns — the modern capital “A.” So, while the original ox head symbol of “a” has been rotated and abstracted over three millennia, its root symbology has never entirely disappeared.

And now we get to the crux of the matter: Why does the letter “a” come first in the alphabet? We know that “a” has stood at the head of the alphabet throughout its known history. But here, somewhat unsatisfactorily, is where certainty runs out. “A” has been first since at least the Phoenician alphabet and possibly in earlier Semitic writing systems that preceded it. But why exactly it sat in first place originally, we cannot say for sure. The Phoenicians left no record explaining their letter order, and the question has been debated by linguists and historians for generations.

Several theories exist, but none of them are proven. It’s possible that the Semitic alphabet followed some kind of order established by earlier Egyptian hieroglyphics, or that each letter had some kind of numerical equivalent that determined the sequence. It’s also possible that there was some kind of mnemonic device that gave rise to the arrangement, but if that was the case, any evidence has long been lost to time. 

Another common theory highlights the importance of the ox in ancient civilizations. In these agricultural societies, the ox was the most valuable animal a family could own — used for plowing, a source of food, and a clear measure of wealth. It could be that aleph — the ox — gained its primacy simply because of the animal’s high status. However, this theory is impossible to verify.

Of course, as with many things in history, it may be that the order of the alphabet was largely or entirely accidental — just a quirk of historical fate. What we do know for sure is that once it had been established, the order became self-reinforcing: Each generation learned the alphabet and passed it down to the next, with “a” firmly in place at the start. No matter how it earned its place at the head of the alphabet, it steadfastly maintained it — becoming one of the most long-lasting human conventions still in daily use. 

Why can we still decipher phrases such as “ths sntnc s mssng vwls” and “tihs senetnce si all jeubmld up”? Humans can understand typos and incomplete words because our brains process language through patterns, context, and prediction, not perfect spelling. Instead of reading letter by letter, the brain takes in whole words and sentences simultaneously, allowing it to fill in gaps when letters are missing or rearranged. This means that while reading, the brain constantly makes educated guesses, and it’s surprisingly good at them.

The brain looks for patterns in everything we do. Musicians use pattern recognition to read music, mathematicians use patterns to solve equations, and physicians rely on patterns for accurate diagnoses. The same is true for language comprehension. Instead of parsing out every single letter in a word, the brain makes predictions. Even if a word is misspelled, the brain can typically decipher it because it processes multiple letters at once and quickly matches them to familiar patterns.

This process develops as children learn to read. It allows us to recognize patterns in speech and text to understand their meaning. We also use it to detect grammatical structures and predict upcoming words. This supports many communication skills, such as reading comprehension and learning new languages.

To recognize a word pattern, the brain sends information to the fusiform gyrus, a structure that plays a crucial role in processing complex visual information. A specialized area on the left side of the fusiform gyrus, known as the visual word form area (VWFA), processes letter patterns and words. Regions on the right side handle face and object recognition.

Language is highly redundant — a driving principle behind the brain’s ability to decipher missing letters using pattern recognition. According to American polymath Claude Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, English is about 50% redundant, meaning not every letter or word carries entirely new information. In fact, most languages are around 50% redundant.

This means that when communicating via text or speech, about half of the letters or words are chosen freely, while the other half are constrained by the language’s statistical structure. In other words, if up to half of the words of this article were removed at random, you could probably still understand it — though this depends on other factors, such as context.

Similarly, if “hlf of te ltrs r rmvd in stnce,” the sentiment can still be understood. However, if more than 50% of the words or letters are removed, comprehension begins to break down, and it is much harder to decode.

Typos with missing vowels are often easier to read than those with missing consonants because the brain is better at recognizing vowel patterns than consonants. Moreover, some experts propose that consonants are more important than vowels for word processing. In many languages, consonants provide the core structure of most words.

When reading altered words, the brain uses common letter combinations, many of which involve vowels. Common examples include bigrams (“er” and “in”) and trigrams (“ion” and “ing”). Because these letters are closely associated with each other, the brain can fill in the gaps to reconstruct words like “fnd” (“find,” using the bigram “in”) and “actn” (“action,” using the trigram “ion”).

In everyday use, abbreviations rely mostly on consonants, and we rarely struggle to interpret them. This includes professional titles such as “Dr.,” “Mgr.,” and “Asst.,” as well as common internet abbreviations like “nvm” (never mind) and “bc” (because).

Along with pattern recognition, the brain relies heavily on context in a process called top-down processing. Context includes surrounding words, prior knowledge, social context, visual context, and the topic of conversation. For example, take the misspelled word “blnk.” Alone, it could mean “blank” or “blink,” but in context the meaning becomes clear: “He was off in the blnk of an eye.” This is what makes crossword puzzles and word games such as Wheel of Fortune possible. Without the helpful clues — context — participants would have a more difficult time deciphering the puzzles.

Context also helps us spot tricky typos. “Typoglycemia” —  a neologism combining“typo” and “glycemia” — is a term referring to the idea that words remain readable if their first and last letters remain intact. Try to read this example: “The barin reiles on paetrtn rocognitien.” While it is helpful to have the first and last letters remain the same, this method relies heavily on context and familiarity, as individual words are difficult to decipher when isolated.

Together, pattern recognition, prediction, and context allow us to communicate efficiently without being slowed down by minor typos. We easily breeze past misspellings and intentional abbreviations without even noticing them in text messages, social media, emails, and autocorrect errors. Even with missing or scrambled letters, your brain focuses on the story, not the spelling.