What is the (subjectively) weirdest word in the English language?

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.

pulchritudinous

such an ugly word, yet it means "beautiful"

Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.

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

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

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

Colonel. Why is it pronounced like kernal?

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".

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.

"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

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

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.

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've always hated "seldom". It just sounds so wrong to have an adverb not ending in -ly. It should clearly be seldomly. Or you can just say "rarely" which means exactly the same so idk why we need two words for the same thing.

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

Albeit, caveat, awry, segue, haphazard, and facsimile are all pronounced weirdly and incorrectly for those who learned a lot of English by reading.

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.

"Sphere"

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

"Cwm"

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

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.

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.

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."

British English - lieutenant is pronounced "Lef-tennant"

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

" sesquipedalian "

I was just thinking "umbrella" is weird. It just seems so random.

niggardly

I think "once" is spelled strangely. In Spanish it's 11 and pronounced as you would expect.

In English the same string of letters is pronounced wonss. Plus the whole once twice thrice for one time two times three times is odd, though at least consistent but then no fourse or anything it just stops.

"Fuck"

I think adjective is the only grammar variation it doesn't cover.

Onomatopoeia - the word for making a word for a sound

strengths

it breaks so many linguistic rules yet feels just fine to say

Dyslexia - it's hard to spell even if you're not dyslexic.

Glossolalia

"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.

Myrrh

Most of the examples here are perfectly cromulent words.

"Winningest"

"Weirdest"

I dunno if it's the weirdest but "pronunciation" is pretty weird.

Why is it "pronUnciation" but "pronOUnce"?

Isthmus. I don't claim to know if it's the weirdest, but it's gotta be one of the most difficult to pronounce!

Kumquat

onomatopoeia (edit) - the word should have been something akin to soundsalotlikea but no one consulted me.

noun

1. The formation or use of words such as buzz or murmur that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
2. The property of a word of sounding like what it represents.
3. A word that sounds like what it represents, such as "gurgle" or "hiss".

Flabbergasted

Vainglorious.

Tabernacle

Syzygy

Just for the spelling really.

Caveat

Flaccid.

pwn

When I run grep -v "[aeiouy]" /usr/share/dict/words|less on my system, it's the only non-abbreviation word that comes up that doesn't have a "a", "e", "i", "o", "u", or "y" and is a real word -- like, Mirriam-Webster lists it:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pwn

slang

: to dominate and defeat (someone or something) : OWN sense 1b, ROUT entry 2 sense 1a

Online gamers use "pwn" to describe annihilating an opponent, or owning them. The word came from misspelling "own" by gamers typing quickly and striking the letter P instead of the neighboring letter O.
— Christopher Rhoads

No government, including Britain's, should have the power to pwn the Internet, and destroy it in the process.
— Amie Stepanovich

Why pwn the noobs from your couch when you could do it in front of an audience at New York's first-ever Fortnite In The Heights Tournament?
—Eva Kis

Then, a bunch of federal attorneys general got pwned in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals regarding their prosecution of medical marijuana businesses, which is a pretty big deal.
—Vince Silwoski

"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.

Acquire (but also "require"???)

I'm a big fan of the following weird words:

Indubitably

Discombobulated

Anything that shows the awful inconsistency in phonetics.

Indubitably

Omit omitted omitting omits – omission –

The * did my t go?

I feel like we will change a lot for digital reasons, especially in coming centuries.

lemmatization - in linguistics is the process of grouping together inflected forms of a word so they can be analyzed as a single item, identified by the word's lemma, or dictionary form; (eg. walk [lemma], walks, walked, walking)

Things like inflected forms and parts of speech that can not be coded easily really have no use in the future. Things like how a sentence can be "I am here." but when I must change more than one word to say "He is here." The am/is change is nonsense of no use. It is like a deep inner conflict with no solution; a prejudice or bias.

Higgledy-piggledy

pork

I can't say for certain, but it's probably one of these.

Sardoodledom

Antidisestablishmentarianism

Phone. Like why? He have the letter F...

Moist

Irony

Orange, nothing rhymes with orange