The most difficult words to pronounce in English tend to be the words that don’t follow the common rules. Anemone pronounce “un-NEH-muh-nee” is a word I used frequently when I lived in Japan. Many students would ask me if I enjoyed eating anemones. The wordhas ‘-one’ at the end of it. So it appears like you should pronounce the word “ah-NEH-mohn”. But that would be wrong. It does not follow the silent “e” rule one expects.

Another word that doesn’t pronounce like it looks is colonel pronounced “ker-nul”. Honestly, it is pronounced so much shorter than the words looks. The word appears to be pronounced “ko-le-nel”. Instead ‘lo’ is completely changed into an ‘r’. The word could even be written as cornel. The oddity is compounded by this though. If we did write the word as cornel it would be pronounced “kor-nel”.

Lastly a word that is just hard to pronounce due to the combination of letters is brewery, pronounced “BROO-wer-ee”. The combination of the ‘re’ then ‘we’ the ‘ry’ can be rather tricky. It feels a bit like a tongue twister whenever I try to pronounce it.

What do you think is the hardest word for you to pronounce in English? How about a word like library? It has double r’s with ‘ra’ and ‘ry’. Let me know what you think!