Commonly mispronounced words

None of these are hard to say. They are hard because the spelling actively misleads, and because most people meet them in writing long before they hear them aloud. Native speakers get them wrong for exactly the same reason.

Play each one, then say it back. The respellings below are a rough guide — the audio is the real answer, and it will follow whichever accent you have selected.

Menus are where English borrows fastest, and a borrowed word arrives with its original spelling conventions attached. Reading those letters as if they were English is what goes wrong.

A large group of academic words came into English from Greek, and they share one trap: a final -e that English usually silences is pronounced in them. If a word ends in -ome, -ole or -oche and looks Greek, assume the last syllable is spoken.

paradigm is the opposite trap from the same family: the g is silent, giving PA-ruh-dime. The related paradigmatic puts the g back.

These are the ones people argue about, and the argument has no winner: each has two forms that dictionaries list as standard. The audio here will give you one of them, not both.

Worth knowing generally: synthesised voices read from a fixed dictionary and pick one variant per word. For a contested word, the audio on this site tells you one accepted pronunciation, not the only one.

Some “mistakes” are simply other accents. The first vowel of either differs between and within both British and American English, and neither is an error. The t in often is pronounced by many speakers and silent for many others; both have been standard for over a century. schedule splits cleanly along the British–American line, which the accent guide covers.

Before you correct someone, check whether you are hearing a different variety rather than a mistake. Compare plays both and settles it in about five seconds.

The word lists page plays the whole mispronounced set end to end, and lets you copy it into your own list so you can come back to only the ones you missed.

Read slowly first. Pronounce each syllable deliberately before trying to blend them at full speed. Rushing hides the vowel and consonant shapes your ear needs to learn.

Record yourself. Most phones have a voice memo app — record a word, then compare it to the playback here. Hearing the gap between your version and the model accent makes targeted practice far easier.

Focus on one accent. Jumping between American, British and Australian in the same session creates confusion. Pick the accent you encounter most and stick with it until the patterns feel natural.

Every word above is a button. Set the accent and voice you want on the main screen, then come back — the guides use whatever you chose. To hear two accents against each other, use Compare; to test whether you can actually hear a contrast, use the listening quiz.