There are too many As for this one to roll off the tongue easily, and if you're wondering what it means, you're not alone. Anathema — that is, someone or something intensely disliked — is in the top 1% of looked-up words on Merriam-Webster.
Even Nemo couldn't pronounce this word in the Pixar movie — and he lives in one! If you can get through the first two syllables, you're in the clear.
Those double Cs spell trouble. Just like the similarly named Arctic, the southern pole often gets renamed the Ant-ART-tic.
For most people, it's the longest word they know. For others, it's a bona fide tongue twister at a whopping total 28 letters and 13 syllables. (Psst, it means being opposed to the withdrawal of state support from an established church.)
Linguists know that pesky metathesis makes this typographical symbol hard to say. Metathesis? That's when people accidentally rearrange sounds or syllables in a word, like a toddler saying spaghetti as "pasketti."
No, it's not just the booze talking. Discussing beer-making bars while sober is hard enough thanks to that tricky middle syllable.
Metathesis strikes again! It doesn't help that many people also confuse cavalry (armed forces on horseback) with the place Calvary, as in the Bible.
It's so, so easy to skip that "tuh" sound, but just because you're relaxing doesn't mean you should give up on enunciation.
Dissimilation is another linguistic phenomenon you can blame mispronunciations on. That's when similar consonants or vowels in a word become less alike, e.g. defibrillator becoming "defibyulator."
The first R in deteriorate gets the same treatment. You could try to say it correctly, or just pick one of many, many synonyms instead: decay, decline, degenerate, devolve... and that's just the Ds!
Take heart. Almost everyone sounds like they have a lisp when they pronounce explicit.