“fine”
because it can mean so many different things, like if you say something is fine, it’s not very good, but “fine dining” is fancy and good.
Sardoodledom
Tabernacle
Tabernak!
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.
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Vainglorious.
Most of the examples here are perfectly cromulent words.
Kumquat
I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.
That looks like something Snoop Dogg would say.
I really only know of this word because of Scott Manley
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been… are all the same word.
“To be” averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. “To have” usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.
Or not to be…
Or not to have…
And it has multiple meanings. “you are sick” can mean that you’re currently sick but can also mean that you’re a sick person. Other languages usually differentiate the verb in those two cases
Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:
“To be” being highly irregular il a common feature of a lot of Indo-European languages. But there’s worse. In Spanish, “ser” and “estar” both mean “to be”, but have wildly different meanings and cannot be substituted for one another.
Same with “go” and “went”.
I god.
I came
“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”.
Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.
For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”
And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).
A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.
Was going to reply that, it’s not that Russian doesn’t have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.
But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don’t know of any other language where verbs are gendered.
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.
“Kitsch” is hard to define weird. “Absquatulate” is the weirdest word I use on a semi-regular basis because it just means to leave quickly.
absquatulate means skedaddle, got it.
How about ersatz?
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.
Thank the French for this one
Ah the french…alwaysbeencelebrated for it’s…excellence!
oiseau – for when consonants are overrated. (it means bird).
How is that pronounced?
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
wazo
Eau - for when consonants are unnecessary
I knew an English speaking American born well off white dude that pronounced this as “kway”. It was the most annoying thing that came out of his mouth besides all of the bragging and “I’m smarter than everyone” attitude.
It’s a Q: a bunch of vowels are lined up behind it!
God damn it. That’s good.
“Winningest”
Trump, that you?
That’s a word?
“We win the most cases” is too long for lawyer billboards, apparently.
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.
" sesquipedalian "
