I have always liked puzzles and word games and am always looking up the origin of words and names. I thought it would be fun to put out a series of caches with the theme of “You’re probably saying it wrong.” I have been told by non-native English speakers that English “is hard.” I have to agree with them! Here are some commonly mispronounced words.
Colonel—pronounced \KER-nul\
The French took the word colonnello from Italian—it comes from the word for “column,” and it referred to the leader of a column of soldiers—but the French altered the spelling to coronel. The word came to English around the mid-1500s. By the mid-1600s, the etymologically “correct” (but by now confusing) spelling colonel was adopted in both French and English.
English is hard.