British English - lieutenant is pronounced “Lef-tennant”
Biweekly.
It means twice a week.
Or, it means once every other week.
Good luck.
The fact that American English doesn’t have the word ‘fortnightly’ is incredibly confusing on every level.
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).
Biweekly is every two weeks (fortnightly)
Semi-weekly is twice a week.
Same rule as bimonthly and semimonthly.
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 😒
pulchritudinous
such an ugly word, yet it means “beautiful”
It’s so similar to “putrid”
Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.
It’s from a political cartoon depicting a corrupt districting plan as a salamander.
A plan proposed by a man named Elbridge Gerry.
queue
Most “Q” words are weird to start with, then just adding a bunch of silent vowels at the end doesn’t make it any less so.
It’s a Q: a bunch of vowels are lined up behind it!
God damn it. That’s good.
Thanks, stole it myself!
Thank the French for this one
oiseau – for when consonants are overrated. (it means bird).
How is that pronounced?
wazo
You can toss it into google translate and listen to audio. It would probably be better than any attempted typing I can do here.
Wiktionary has a lot of audio transcriptions too: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oiseau
I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.
I really only know of this word because of Scott Manley
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”.
I always assumed it was a loan word from Japanese. TIL.
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been… are all the same word.
Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:
“be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.
Not in Turkish. It is “olmak” but the actual “to be” as it is used in “I am, they were, etc.” is, now unused “imek”. it has become a suffix and it is completely regular. Just i + person suffix.
“Though”
The first two letters don’t sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.
The word Through is just cheating at Scrabble
-Eddie Izzard
It would be half-true if we hadn’t gotten rid of a letter (the thorn, which made the"th" sound)
For a long time, they used the letter “Y” instead of “th”.
That’s how we have weird relationships with old English words like “You/Thou,” and “The/Ye.”
“You” and “thou” come from different roots. They are not simply different orthographies like “ye” and “the”.
80% of the letters in “queue” are unnecessary.
No, they’re demonstrating how to line up quietly.
Side note, I was a young teen when I first saw this word and it was in reference to computer things I barely grasped and had no idea. I was asking my parents what a qwe-we was because I could not for the life of me figure out how to pronounce it. It stuck with me for years until BBC content started coming to America, then it all finally made sense.
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!
Awkward is spelled awkwardly.
Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?
Let me introduce you to the British pronunciation of the word “lieutenant”.
lieutenant (UK: /lɛfˈtɛnənt/ lef-TEN-ənt)
“Cwm”
One of a few words that use W as a vowel. (This is how the word “Pwn” works too)
Albeit, caveat, awry, segue, haphazard, and facsimile are all pronounced weirdly and incorrectly for those who learned a lot of English by reading.
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.
This is called “semantic satiation” which are both pleasingly weird words now that I think about it…
