It's almost as though we're all making up words as we go along, huh?
It’s one of the most charming hazards of loving books: you’re exposed to a much wider, richer vocabulary than you are in everyday life. And so when you meet unfamiliar words on the page, your brain just takes a guess at pronunciation, sometimes incorrectly.
That’s certainly not your fault. For one thing, English, written or spoken, is famously inconsistent and phonetically confusing. Second, when we see a new word, it’s natural to apply established rules we think make sense. Linguists even have a term for this called “spelling pronunciation.” Sometimes it works out beautifully. Other times…not so much.
When one Reddit user, a self proclaimed “voracious reader,” admitted they’d spent years mispronouncing “banal” and “ultimatum” due to only seeing it written down, a wave of fellow bookworms were inspired to confess their own humbling word mistakes:
“Albeit as ‘all bite’ instead of "all be it" probably because I was learning German as a kid.”
“Anemone too. Hooked on Phonics didn't prepare us for these words at all.”
“Armageddon. In my mind, I pronounced it Ar-MEGA-don, like some sort of dinosaur.”
Dinosaur media0.giphy.com
“Bedraggled. I broke it up as bed-raggled rather than be-draggled. I still like the image that invoked!”
Many admitted that even after they learned the correct pronunciation, their brains couldn’t fathom saying it any other way. Linguists call this phenomenon a “fossilization of errors,” which is a simple way of saying that a repeated mistake gets so ingrained and unconscious that it becomes your brain’s default setting. This isn’t impossible to correct, but it's not easy.
“Somehow I read it as BE-emoth with a silent h and second e was soft. 🤷🏽♀️. Because I read that word for a decade or so before I actually ever heard it I've never adjusted and it still sounds like a mispronunciation when people use it.“
“Cacophony. For years, I said CACK-uh-fawn-ee in my head. I spoke it out loud one day, and my husband was like wth????!!!”
“Detritus. Always pronounced it in my head with a short ‘i’ then finally heard it spoken.”
“Dilapidated - read it in a book and knew full well what it meant, then pointed out some dilpa-dated houses to my mom when we were driving.”
“I’d explain en-ER-Gee (hard G) but I don’t have enough energy.”
“Every time I see ‘epitome’ written my brain says ‘ep-i-tome.’ Always takes a second to realize, oh.. ‘E-pit-oh-mee.’”
“I chose to focus my [college] report on the ornate Greek and Roman- inspired fa-KA-days of renaissance architecture. About halfway through, the professor politely raised his hand and said, ‘Excuse me for interrupting, but are you meaning to say facade?’ Oh, right, yes, of course. 😬😖”
Clueless media0.giphy.com
“Gauge. I knew ‘gage’ was a word, but I thought this was a separate word pronounce ‘gog.’”
“I described something gross as GRO tes cue. It was grotesque.”
“As a child, I loved telling my older relatives how gullible my little brother was. I said it as ‘Gill-able’".
“Harbinger. I was in my thirties when I first said it aloud in front of people and learned it was har-binj-er, not har-bing-er.”
Agatha All Along media1.giphy.com
“Very young me pronounced huge as hug.”
“Young me assumed it was ‘highpocritical’ when I first encountered it.”
"’in-dicked’ for ‘indict.’”
“Inevitable.I had it as in-uh-VIT-uh-ble.”
“Macabre. Legit thought it was mock-ah-brey. And never associated when someone said muh-cob as the word I read.”
There’s also sometimes a fun bit of reader logic at play, fixing the language so that it works within the fictional worlds read about.
“When I was maybe 7 or 8 a magician performed at the school near me. My mom took me…We got in an argument because…I knew the word ‘magic.’ and I knew what the C at the end sounded like. HOW DARE SHE try to convince me to say ‘magishin’ when it was quite obvious that the word ‘magic’ had a suffix added and now said ‘maj-i-can’…I probably believed it was maj-i-can for another year after that before something or other convinced me otherwise.”
Gif media3.giphy.com
"As a pre-teen, I used to read a lot of historical novels and had no idea what ‘beribboned’ meant or how it was pronounced. Turns out it's ‘be-ribboned’ (as in covered in ribbons), but I pronounced it like ‘berry-boned’ and thought it had something to do with corset stays.”
Women media2.giphy.com
“Mine was ‘melancholy.’ In my head it was meh-lan-cho-lee, instead of melon-collie.”
“Misled: I used to read this as MY-zld.”
“The 'mores' part of social mores. I pronounced the word as if it rhymes with 'bores' well into adulthood. I heard Hilary Clinton use it in a speech about ten years ago and was shocked. I even pronounced it as rhymes with bores in a college presentation before a large class and was not corrected.”
“Subtle 😭”
“The Tao of Pooh is an excellent introduction to Taoist philosophy using Winnie the Pooh has the ultimate Zen. While discussing the book with a friend I was informed that Tao is pronounced with a D, not a T. I had no idea.”
Winnie the Pooh media3.giphy.com
“Tertiary TER-tee-ary. I'm still not sure how there's a ‘shee’ in there.”
“Trebuchet. It always puzzled me how an english speaker would pronounce this. I concluded with Tree Bucket.”
“Vehement. I always read it as va-HE-ment.”
On the bright side, we do live in an age where we can instantly Google the correct pronunciation of a word the minute we see it. So, keep reading. After all, every word you learn (even the ones you trip over) makes the world a little more interesting.
Literally sailing off into the sunset. 
A photo near Times Square from 1973.