40 Difficult Words to Pronounce in English (With IPA, Examples and Fixes)

Jump to the silent letters, spelling that lies, disappearing syllables, stress traps, th, r and consonant clusters, loanwords, the 10 hardest, the words with two correct pronunciations, the difficult sounds behind them, or the three read-aloud passages that use all 40 words.

How to read this list of difficult words

The 40 words are grouped by the six reasons a word is hard: a silent letter, letters that stand for other sounds, a lost syllable, unexpected stress, piled-up consonants or a foreign sound. Each row gives the IPA from the Cambridge Dictionary, American (US) first, then British (UK), and links to the entry with both recordings; the respelling (KER-nul) puts the stressed syllable in capitals, and Cambridge’s pronunciation guide explains the symbols.

The counts in this article are our own tally of those Cambridge transcriptions: US and UK are identical for 12 of the 40 words, and 24 have a schwa (ə or ɚ) in the American form, 5 of them only as an optional one.

Silent letters: 7 words where you skip a letter

Seven of the 40 words have a letter you should not say: the b in debt, subtle and plumber, the p in receipt, the s in island, the l in salmon and the d in Wednesday.

Four of these letters were never said in English: Oxford Learner’s notes that the b in debt came “by association with the Latin word” debitum, the -p- in receipt “was inserted in imitation of the Latin spelling”, and the l in salmon is “influenced by Latin”. Island got its s in the 16th century from the unrelated word isle, and in all four words the pronunciation never followed the spelling.

Spelling that lies: 7 words that sound nothing like they look

In these seven words every letter is there, but the letters stand for different sounds: colonel has an r sound where the first l is written, choir starts with kw, and the o in women sounds like the i in “win”.

Colonel and choir changed their spelling centuries ago and kept their old sounds: Oxford Learner’s traces colonel to the obsolete French form coronel, “source of the modern pronunciation”, and choir to Middle English quer, respelled in the 17th century “due to association with Latin chorus and modern French choeur”. Cambridge gives kernel the same transcription as colonel, so the two make a perfect practice pair.

Disappearing syllables: 6 words that are shorter than they look

In these six words a written vowel is not said, so the spoken word has fewer syllables than the written one: vegetable has three syllables, chocolate two. Mischievous is the reverse trap: people add a syllable that is not there.

Dictionaries treat the short forms as standard: Oxford Learner’s lists the three-syllable /ˈkʌmftəbl/ first for comfortable, in both British and American English. February has the same history as debt: its spelling changed in the 15th century “due to association with the Latin word”, which is why the first r is so easy to lose.

Stress traps: 7 words where the strong syllable moves

These seven words are hard because the stress is not where learners expect it, often because a related word is stressed differently: PHOtograph but phoTOGrapher, proNOUNCE but pronunciAtion.

Misplaced stress makes a word harder to recognize. In a 2005 study in TESOL Quarterly, John Field asked native and non-native listeners to write down recorded speech in which word stress and vowel quality had been changed. The two groups reacted to misplaced stress in very similar ways, and how much intelligibility suffered depended on which way the stress moved and whether the vowels changed with it. The same mechanism separates the noun and the verb in record and present; the list of English words with multiple meanings covers those pairs.

th, r and consonant clusters: 7 words that are hard to say fast

These seven words have no spelling trick; they are hard for the mouth. Sixth ends in three consonants in a row, /ksθ/; strengths ends in ng, th and s; rural and squirrel pack r and l into two short syllables.

Strengths is worth extra practice before any job interview, because “What are your strengths?” comes up in so many of them; the guide to English for job interviews has a model answer to say out loud. The cluster rule carries over to other words: say the shorter word first (six, strength, month), then add one sound at a time (sixth, strengths, months).

Loanwords: 6 words that kept their foreign sound

These six words came into English from French, Italian and, through Spanish, Quechua, and they kept part of their original sound: the zh in genre, the final stress in entrepreneur, the “keen” at the start of quinoa.

The source language explains the sound: Oxford Learner’s traces genre, niche, entrepreneur and cache to French, where ch is “sh”, so cache is “cash” and niche can be “neesh”. Espresso is Italian for “pressed out” coffee and never had an x, and quinoa is the Spanish spelling of the Quechua word kinua.

What are the 10 hardest words to pronounce in English?

There is no official ranking, but these 10 of the 40 are the ones to practice first: the spelling gives almost no help, and most of them also appear in other published lists of hard words.

Lists of 50 or 100 difficult words add rarer words with the same traps: draught (DRAHFT; American spelling draft), facade (fuh-SAHD), paradigm (PAIR-uh-dime, silent g), macabre (muh-KAH-bruh), onomatopoeia (on-uh-mat-uh-PEE-uh) and anemone (uh-NEM-uh-nee). Long regular words such as otorhinolaryngologist are long rather than hard: read them syllable by syllable.

Which of these words have two correct pronunciations?

Native speakers say these eight words from the list two ways, and Cambridge or Oxford Learner’s records both, so a form that differs from yours is not always a mistake. The tables above show the main form; this table shows the accepted alternative.

What are the most difficult sounds in English?

The most difficult sounds in English for learners are th (/θ/ in “think”, /ð/ in “this”), the American r, the dark l at the end of a word, long against short vowels, the schwa, and clusters of consonants such as /ksθ/ in sixth. The th sounds are hard for a structural reason: in Ian Maddieson’s chapter of the World Atlas of Language Structures (2013), sounds of this type occur in just 43 of the 566 languages surveyed, 7.6%. Most learners have no version of them in their first language.

Difficult words to pronounce with a lisp: a lisp, in Cambridge’s definition, means saying “s” and “z” sounds like “th”, so “sin” sounds like “thin”. The hardest words on this list for a lisp mix s with th or repeat it: sixth, strengths, specific, mischievous. Keep the tongue tip behind the upper teeth for s; a lisp that does not change with practice is one for a speech-language pathologist.

Which of these sounds is hardest for you depends on your first language. The English pronunciation practice guide has a table of trouble spots by native language and ten minimal pairs to drill them.

How to practice difficult words: hear, build, record

A difficult word sticks after four steps: hear it from a dictionary, build it up syllable by syllable, test the sound against its pair, then say it inside a sentence and record yourself. The last step matters most, because a word you can say alone can still break at normal speed in a sentence.

1. Hear it. Open the Cambridge entry (every word in the tables links to it), play the American or British audio three times and choose one. Find the stress mark (ˈ) before you say anything.
2. Build it. Say it slowly by syllables, then at normal speed: KER, KER-nul. For clusters, start from the shorter word: six, sixth.
3. Test the contrast. If the problem is a sound rather than a spelling, use a minimal pair such as think / sink or world / word: say both, record both, and check that they sound different.
4. Say it in a sentence and record it. Read the passages below, record yourself, and play the recording next to the dictionary audio. The guide to practicing English speaking alone covers recording routines; English shadowing practice (repeating a recording a split second behind the speaker) is the step after that.

The three passages below use all 40 words. Listen first, then record yourself; the trainer under each passage plays the text, records you and shows your pace in words per minute.

For longer texts with the same trainer, the graded English speaking practice texts run from A2 up to B2–C1. For an outside view of your pronunciation and fluency together, the free English speaking test in the Fluently app takes about four minutes of spoken answers.

Hear what you actually said

A dictionary tells you how colonel should sound; it cannot tell you how you said it. Fluently is an AI speaking coach for iOS and Android: you answer out loud, and the app gives feedback on pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary and grammar. The download is free and starts with a free four-minute speaking assessment; full practice is a subscription after a free trial. Fluently is rated 4.8 on the App Store from 5.8K ratings (October 2026).

Download on theApp StoreGet it onGoogle Play