Ask Lemmy

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.

Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.

pulchritudinous

such an ugly word, yet it means "beautiful"

Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been... are all the same word.

I suppose technically it's Latin, but I've always been fascinated with "syzygy".

“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.

Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?

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.

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".

"Though"

The first two letters don't sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.

Awkward is spelled awkwardly.

Gubernatorial

Biweekly.

It means twice a week.

Or, it means once every other week.

Good luck.

I don't know about weirdest, but here are some quirky words:

• inflammable means the same thing as flammable

• "the/a". If you're a native English speaker, like me, it probably doesn't look unusual. I was listening to a lecture series on linguistics and it wasn't until then that I learned that most languages out there don't have a mandatory definite/indefinite article. In most languages, if you want to say "cat", you can say "cat". English requires you to say "a cat" or "the cat" -- the presence of an article to indicate whether the thing you're talking about is unique or not. That's an unusual feature for a language to have. It's baked into how I think, but a lot of the world just doesn't work that way.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Crosslinguistic_variation

  Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages (only the definite article)[citation needed], and Polynesian languages; however, they are formally absent from many of the world's major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, many Turkic languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages, the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases.

• "data". It used to normally be the plural of datum, but within living memory has normally become a mass noun, like "water" or "air" or "love". It's not the only word to do this, but it's unusual.

• "deer". It's not the only word to do this either, but it's one of a small number of words in English where the plural and singular form can be (and traditionally, needed to be) identical. Today, it looks like regular forms of these are increasingly being considered acceptable, at least in American English ("deers", "fishes", etc).

As a native speaker of language that is spelled the way its written. I can say that most of them are weird.

• Funny weird: gobbledygook
• Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
• Shortest weird: A
• Literally weird: weird
• Dangerously weird: Conservative
• Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
• Properly weird: FNORD

Eye.

We take it for granted now, but I'm sure we all questioned the word at one point in our lives, the shortest word guaranteed to fool any child who is an intuitive spelling pro if they don't already know the word's spelling.

I love salubrious as it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is (health giving or healthy.)

"of"

It's just odd that you're supposed to say it like it rhymes with "love". It's also almost always with other words, so by itself it truly looks suspicious.

        of

Kerfluffle

https://www.etymonline.com/word/kerfuffle

Epicaricacy. We chose to use a German loanword instead.

Or words that came from fiction like cromulent and thagomizer.

sew

Pronounced exactly the same as sow, if you mean the right sow and not the other sow, which is spelled the same but pronounced differently.

I'm gonna throw "forecastle" out there. It's referring to a specific part/area of a ship, but it's pronounced similar to "folks-sole."

"Cwm"

One of a few words that use W as a vowel. (This is how the word "Pwn" works too)

"Sphere"

That pronunciation ... like WTF ... did word inventors just figure we had totally exhausted the sound combinations that we could splice together?!

It's a little weird that syphilis and chlamydia are way more euphonic than they ought to be. They just roll off the tongue and feel so good to say.

Miscellaneous, no one that isn't a native English speaker knows how to pronounce that word

Acknowledge, no one that isn't a native English speaker knows how to write that word