100 Difficult English Words to Pronounce, With IPA

The hardest English words to pronounce are hard for one of five reasons: silent letters, a spelling borrowed from another language, unpredictable stress, a consonant cluster that resists the mouth, or a syllable that native speakers quietly drop. Colonel is /ˈkɜːnəl/, said exactly like kernel. This guide lists 108 of them, grouped by what makes each one difficult.

Every entry gives the standard British transcription, an easy respelling with the stressed syllable in capitals, and a one-line note on the specific trap. Type any of them into the pronunciation Studio to hear the word and compare the British and American versions.

How to use this list

Do not try to learn all 108. Read down the notes column and stop at the words you actually use, or the ones you have heard yourself hesitate over. Ten words you say often are worth more than a hundred you will never need.

The method that works for a stubborn word is always the same. Split it into syllables, say them slowly and separately, place the stress, then run them together and speed up. Repeating the whole word at full speed usually just rehearses the version you already have.

One note on the transcriptions. Where British and American English genuinely differ, the difference is marked in the note rather than hidden. Neither accent is the standard the other should be measured against.

The five things that make a word hard

Difficulty in English pronunciation is not mysterious. Almost every hard word falls into one or more of five categories, and naming the category is usually most of the fix.

Silent letters. The spelling shows a letter that speech dropped centuries ago, or one that was never said at all. Debt has never had a /b/ sound in English: the letter was inserted to show the Latin root. Once you know a letter is silent, the word is easy.

Foreign spelling rules. Choir, chaos and psychology all use spelling conventions from Greek. Bouquet, buffet and depot use French ones. The letters are behaving correctly, just according to a different system. These are the words where guessing from English rules produces the most confident wrong answers.

Unpredictable stress. Comparable and photography contain no difficult sounds at all. The whole problem is which syllable gets the beat, and a wrong beat makes a familiar word unrecognisable in a way a wrong vowel rarely does.

Consonant clusters. Sixths /sɪksθs/ asks your mouth to produce four consonants with no vowel to rest on. Nothing about it is exotic, and it is still physically hard, even for people who have said it all their lives.

Disappearing syllables. Comfortable has four written syllables and three spoken ones. Saying all four is not more correct, it is less natural, and it marks the speaker out more than a small vowel error would.

A word that combines two of these is where real trouble starts. Worcestershire has silent letters, a foreign-derived spelling and a syllable count that bears no relation to its length. Lieutenant has a silent pattern plus a different answer in each major accent.

Words with silent letters

The letters are on the page and nowhere in the sound. The silent letters guide covers the patterns behind these in full.

Words whose spelling came from somewhere else

These are not irregular by accident. Each kept the spelling rules of the language it came from.

The -ough words

One spelling, at least six pronunciations, and no pattern to extract. These have to be learned individually.

Read that list aloud in order and the problem is obvious. Though, through and thorough differ by one or two letters and share almost no sound at all.

Words where the stress is in an unexpected place

Every sound in these is easy. The beat is the problem, and putting it in the wrong place is what makes the word unrecognisable. The word stress guide explains the patterns behind them.

Words with consonant clusters that resist

Nothing exotic here. The sounds are ordinary and the problem is fitting them together without a vowel to rest on. The consonant clusters guide works through the mechanics.

Words where the vowel is not what the spelling says

Words borrowed from French

French endings are the common thread. The final consonant is usually silent and the stress often lands somewhere English would not put it.

Words from Greek and elsewhere

Words with a syllable that disappears

These look longer on the page than they sound. Native speakers drop a written syllable, and saying every one makes the word sound over-careful rather than more correct.

The vowel that goes missing is almost always an unstressed one, and what it collapses into first is the schwa. That is the same process at work across the whole language, described in the schwa guide.

Words that are changing right now

Some of the entries above are not fixed. Pronunciation shifts, and when a variant becomes common enough, dictionaries record it rather than ruling against it. That leaves a set of words where two answers are both correct, and being told off for either is unjustified.

Often is the clearest case. The t was dropped centuries ago, then partly restored by people who could see it in the spelling, and both /ˈɒfən/ and /ˈɒftən/ are now standard.

Controversy is split along regional lines. British English has both KON-truh-vur-see and kuhn-TROV-uh-see in ordinary use, while American English uses the first-syllable version almost exclusively.

Applicable, formidable, despicable and hospitable are all in the middle of the same shift. Each originally had first-syllable stress, each is now widely said with the stress one syllable later, and dictionaries list both.

Niche has genuinely split by country: neesh in Britain, commonly nitch in the United States.

What does not change is the set of words with one listed pronunciation. Saying espresso with an x, or mischievous with four syllables, is not a variant that dictionaries have accepted. The line between change and error is simply whether the variant has been recorded, which is why checking beats guessing.

How to fix a word you keep getting wrong

The habit is the hard part, not the sounds. Repeating a word you already say incorrectly, at speed, mostly rehearses the error. This sequence works better.

1. Find the transcription. Read it symbol by symbol rather than glancing at it. The point is to see which sounds are actually there, which usually differs from what the spelling suggested.
2. Count the syllables from the transcription, not the spelling. For comfortable that gives three, not four. This step alone fixes a surprising number of words.
3. Find the stress mark and say only that syllable, loudly. KUHMF. Then FTUH. Then BUHL. Separately, with gaps.
4. Join them in pairs. KUHMF-tuh, then tuh-buhl. Pairs are where most errors reappear, because the join is where your old habit lives.
5. Say the whole word slowly, then at normal speed, five times. If the wrong version comes back, go back to step three rather than pushing through.
6. Put it in a short sentence you would actually say. A word practised only in isolation tends to revert the moment it has neighbours.
7. Record yourself and listen the next day. Same-day listening is unreliable, because you hear what you meant.

Five minutes on one word beats an hour on twenty. Most people have a personal list of five or six words they stumble on, and clearing that list is a finite job.

Practice: the ten that catch people out most

Say each of these out loud, then check it against the tables above.

1. colonel
2. mischievous
3. epitome
4. sixths
5. comfortable
6. espresso
7. anemone
8. comparable
9. queue
10. Wednesday
11. thorough
12. genre
13. bury
14. February

If you got all fourteen, the remaining difficulty in English is mostly names and places rather than vocabulary. If you missed several, note which category they came from. People rarely miss words at random: it is usually one of the five causes at the top of this page doing the same thing over and over.

What this list deliberately leaves out

Names, brands and places are missing on purpose, because they follow different rules. A dictionary can settle anemone. It cannot settle how a company says its own name or how a town says its own name, and pretending otherwise produces confident wrong answers.

Those have separate guides where the sourcing is handled properly: 50 mispronounced place names and 50 brand names people get wrong. Words that change pronunciation depending on their meaning, such as lead, wind and record, are also a separate category, covered in the heteronyms guide.

For anything not on this page, the Studio will give you a transcription and a spoken version in either accent. For words that genuinely matter, check a learner dictionary as well, since no automatic tool is right every time.