Quirky, Aphonetic Words that don't have Spelling Pronunciation



Aphonetic is a term a member of the English Stack Exchange forum uses to describe words whose pronunciation bears no relationship to their spelling.  These strangely pronounced aphonetic words can be troublesome as those unfamiliar with these words would be unable to guess how to pronounce them just by looking at the spelling. For example, "colonel" is pronounced as ker-nil while "gaol" is pronounced  as jeyl.

Using the trick of having Google Spreadsheet act as a read-only database, I maintain the word list in Google Sheets & use Google Sheets API to display it through JavaScript & a web front-end. Check it out

Update [26-Aug-2021]: The original code relied on Google Sheet API v3 which has been retired in August 2021 and therefore had to be replaced. I'll document & share the code I wrote that uses Google Sheet API v4 some time soon.

Using the trick of having Google Spreadsheet act as a read-only database, I re-used the AngularJS script I wrote to show off my book collection to track aphonetic words. Check it out to know what I'm talking about, contribute more such words in the comments section below or adapt the code to track the aphonetic words that you find strange.

The source code is shared as a Github Gist. Read the instructions on how to get data stored in a Google Spreadsheet as a JSON feed in the article I wrote earlier and just modify the Google Spreadsheet key of the file where you'll add the words to track.


It currently works only in Chrome (tested in version 39). Firefox doesn't support mp3 files and I've to figure to why it doesn't work on IE 11.

StackOverflow helped me with the issues that arose with AngularJS:

* The audio file related to the pronunciation is generated dynamically & served from a Google domain. AngularJS 1.2 ships with Strict Contextual Escaping (SCE) enabled by default. As a result, URLs generated dynamically through AngularJS code throw an error. So I'm using AngularJS version 1.0.3.

* The ngCloak directive was used to prevent the Angular html template from being briefly displayed by the browser in its raw (uncompiled) form while the application is loading.


I linked the words to the fastest online dictionary, Vocabulary.com to aid those who want to learn more about that word.

Related reading - Most Indian languages, unlike English, have a nearly phonetic spelling, so the spelling of a word is a highly reliable guide to its modern pronunciation. Indians' tendency to pronounce English phonetically as well can cause divergence from British English. This phenomenon is known as spelling pronunciation. The most famous dictionary of Indian English is Yule and Brunell's Hobson-Jobson (1886)

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