‘Cheugy,’ ‘omicron’ among 2021’s most mispronounced words

By WILLIAM J. KOLE
Associated Press

The list of 2021’s most mispronounced words is out, and they’re a mouthful. The U.S. Captioning Company, which captions and subtitles real-time events on TV and in courtrooms, compiled the list. It highlights the names and terms that were most challenging for newsreaders and people on television to pronounce. Omicron, the World Health Organization’s name for the latest COVID-19 variant, made the list. So did singer-songwriter Billie Eilish and Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, since broadcasters tend to butcher their names. Other words that made people stumble were dogecoin, a cryptocurrency, and Glasgow, the Scottish city that hosted last month’s U.N. Climate Conference.