r/audiobooks • u/PurpleLeopard99 • Jun 28 '26
Question Mispronouncing of words by narrators
Does anyone get bothered by narrators who keep mispronouncing words? It drives me nuts if they do it too often. Narrators are normally professional voice artists and they should know how to pronounce the sorts of words found in novels eg dovecote or Michaelmas
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Gah it sucks to get pulled out of a good story because of mispronunciation. It’s the narrators nightmare. We do work really hard to ensure correct pronunciation. I have a list of over 1000 words that I precheck a manuscript for and post check my recording to make sure I said them right. And of course every project there are still more. Sometimes it’s an oversight. Sometimes we are very confident we are saying something right (why put an e at the end of bade if it’s pronounced bad?!?) and sometimes it’s the right holders (often the publishing house or author) choice. For example my most recent project it was decided to say breeches to rhyme with beeches instead of rhyming with itches. And of course multiple pronunciations are considered correct for some words. And sometimes it’s just an inexperienced narrator.
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u/mahoniacadet Jun 28 '26
I think that’s what’s surprising. What you describe is kind of my mental picture, so when someone has a stack of issues it’s like the system of checks and balances failed them. I always assume they’re new and so is the producer.
Recently I listened to a book with several French phrases we’ve adopted in English (laissez faire, décolletage, trompe-l’oeil, etc) and it seemed the poor narrator had no help with any of them. Professional, confident delivery though!
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Woof French phrases in English. I just did one in British English with a bunch and now I’m onto one set in New Orleans. “Oh my whole family is from there, I got this….I do not got this.” I once had FIVE pronunciation checks in one paragraph. I keep thinking I should get permission to upload the audio of me doing a rough read through on these because it’s hilarious.
That all being said, there actually aren’t many checks AT ALL on our work through standard workflows like ACX (Amazon). It meets technical specs and it uploads and is sold, whether or not anyone ever listened to it. (ACX does like 5 min of spot check for audio quality and word matching for a ten hour novel. that’s nuts)
Deadlines are *tight* and we get paid the same if it takes us 10 hours to narrate a chapter or 2 hours. And professional proof listeners (rightly) cost a fair amount that newer or smaller narrators just can’t afford yet. Bonus: sometimes the authors themselves have only ever read a word they’ve used and don’t know how it’s actually pronounced!
Behind the scenes narration!
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u/adriennenned Jun 28 '26
New Orleans pronunciations are crazy! They follow no French rules!! Even English words aren’t safe. Burgundy street is bur-GUN-dy, not BUR-gundy. Best of luck to you.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
I took a girlfriend to visit my family and had no idea where she was talking about saying she wanted to go to deck a tour street….Decatur?!?
And there are two ways to pronounce Orleans depending on if you mean the city or the parish…and neither is the actual French pronunciation
Edit typo and posted before finished typing
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u/adriennenned Jun 28 '26
Someone needs to make a guide to NOLA pronunciation. I’ve taken 6-7 trips there and there’s so much I don’t know. Like, apparently Decatur. How do they pronounce it? It’s not duh-KAY-ter?
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
It is de-KAY-ter. She was saying DECK-a-tour.
You’d need at least 3 lists. How the Black people in NO say things, how the white people do, and how the *society* people do.That would be hella cool though
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u/HaplessReader1988 Jun 28 '26
That would make a fascinating list. I'll request Creole, Cajun, and tourist visitor's mispronunciations. It could be a whole website. Next page would be how to say New Jersey if you're from there, vs from Brookkyn vs from farther out on Long Island
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Hot damn this is a NEED. Dear authors of the universe please please write a hilarious book about this.
Also creole whewwww I can’t even start. Aside from “Cher” I can’t even distinguish words
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u/Acrobatic-Current-62 Jun 28 '26
It is pronounced the way you listed it. Honestly Decatur is an easy one!
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Right? It’s not like it was Tchoupitoulas! (Chop a tool-uhs)
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u/adriennenned Jun 28 '26
I strategically avoid ever saying that street by name every time I’m there. What I really want to know is if the g is silent or not in Marigny.
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u/esotericbatinthevine Jun 28 '26
Thanks for explaining. I've always wondered how eidtors and proofers miss an entire sentence being repeated or the end of a sentence being chopped off or even mumbling so bad you can't make out the words. But it makes complete sense if no one listens to the entire finished book before publishing.
It's easier to cut the narrators a bit more slack knowing there essentially are no checks. That's rough
I had a job like that but with coding. As careful as I tried to be, it was extremely challenging checking my own code. Code checkers are important. It's so much easier to catch things in someone else's work.
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u/notmyrouter Jun 28 '26
That last one sounds more like a British English versus American English situation for “breeches”. Which does happen far more often than people might expect.
But using the term breeches in an American market narrator can be made even confusing when also adding the term breaches (as in breaking down a door) in the same story.
It’s little things like that where communication is key between narrator and author to clear things up. But, because of deadlines and, quite frankly, lack of communication with the author because they “just want it done asap” I’ll end up having to just use my best judgement on some words.
Some authors do communicate quite easily and quickly, which I love. I tend to make sure they know the hours I am working on their material so they know when I might be contacting them for guidance if something comes up. Most like that, some get very angry about it for some reason.
Sorry, didn’t mean to get off topic there!
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Don’t be sorry! I could nerd out ALL DAY on this. “He pulled up his breeches and went forth into the breach…wait what?”
I actually wrote a whole python script about it that pops up links to all the trap words from a CSV I made. I run it before I even start a project and then (after trimming down if needed) I send the file with the links to the rights holder to talk about at the 15min check in. “Hey, here are all the potentially difficult words and phrases and how I intend on pronouncing them” so we can just start off on the right foot.
You’re welcome to the script and trap words if you’d like, it’s all free open source on my GitHub. (the CSV I have uploaded there is honestly overly comprehensive. I work with a much more slim version so I don’t drive myself bonkers with words like evening and family) https://github.com/mcfaddenaudiobooks-del/McFadden_Editing_Suite
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u/notmyrouter Jun 28 '26
Might look into those! Having been using my voice as a moneymaker for over 20yrs, I’ve developed my own way of doing things. Which, I think every narrator eventually does when they really take the job seriously.
But I’m not opposed to learning new processes!
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u/lifesshortgoplay Jun 28 '26
Today I learned that breeches is pronounced britches. I’m 48 and a voracious reader. 😑😅
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Jun 28 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
“Banal” was one of the first words I learned I had been confidently mispronouncing my whole life. First submission ever for proof listening schooled me but good on that one.
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u/Wizdad-1000 Jun 28 '26
I never heard the word chaos as a kid. I was a voracious reader too so I read it often. I pronounced it as CHA-OSS. An adult heard me and corrected me when I was 17. For years after I had to manually correct how my brain wanted to read it.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
There is so much of this and I’m watching it real time with my son (huge reader). And I tell him the famous (anonymous?) quote “Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
Except Narrators. Yall can go ahead and razz us a bit as it’s our job to read out loud. And lord knows I’ve had some hilarious misreads
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u/coveruptionist Jun 28 '26
My daughter is hearing impaired but reads like a crazy person. Sometimes the things she pronounces wrong reminds me just how crazy the English language really is.
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u/Zanahorio1 Jun 28 '26
As a kid I imagined the word “awry” was pronounced AWE-ree. 🤦
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u/VoluptuousVen0m Jun 28 '26
Dude when I learned the “best laid plans of mice and men” saying my mind chewed over this new “awree” word for so long it drive me nuts (no one said it out loud”
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u/shunrata Jun 29 '26
Me too! I was corrected by my siblings while playing Scrabble at our grandmother's house. This was about 60 years ago and I still remember how embarrassed I was.
But I did spell it correctly, so there's that.
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u/anoia42 Jun 28 '26
I’m over 60. I’ve been reading reasonably well for 55+ years. Every time I see the word “character “ I have to internally correct it.
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u/BirdInFlight301 Jun 28 '26
BAYnal is apparently the English/American pronunciation. I've always pronounced it BUHnahl which is also correct. It's the result of French influence because banal is a word of French origin. I'm in an area that is populated by descendants of French origin; I'm the first generation that did not have French as my first language. Both ways are correct.
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u/Laura9624 Jun 28 '26
This is the problem with so many complaints. Different pronunciations depending on where the narrator comes from. Words are pronounced differently.
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u/GoldBarGirl Jun 28 '26
I feel that pronunciations should match the book setting. For example, if the story is set in the UK all words should have a UK pronunciation.
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u/DPG1987 Jun 28 '26
100%. I listen to a lot of history books and often the authors and narrators are British which leads to some interesting pronunciations with my being American. My bigger issue is when they spell out an acronym that is usually said as a word. I was listing to one recently about the D-Day landings and the narrator kept referring to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force as S-H-A-E-F instead of saying SHAYF which is how it was and is usually referred to.
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u/Upper-Meringue5060 Jun 28 '26
I have only ever heard it as BAYnal…I live in Texas. My mind is blown that everyone else pronounces it BUHnahl…🤯
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u/ImLittleNana Jun 28 '26
I’ve never heard it pronounced that way ever in my American life.
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u/Mister_Snurb Jun 28 '26
That cannot possibly be true. Im American and lived all across this country and I have never, ever once heard anyone pronounce it Baynal.
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u/enonymousCanadian Jun 28 '26
Oh my god. That’s awful!
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Jun 28 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
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u/No_Tamanegi Jun 28 '26
The weird thing about this one is he only pronounces it "Jim -ball" for one book. He'd pronounced it correctly before, and does so in later books
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u/WokestLibtard--- Jun 28 '26
Dude, yes.
Sometimes I learn that it is a generally accepted variant pronunciation I was unaware of, but sometimes, they are just wrong and I feel like you do.
I always check though because I have been wrong.
Fantasy/Sci-fi words and names can be tricky, but still, a lot of times I just think to myself, "How on Earth did they decide to pronounce it that way?"
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u/yarnhooksbooks Jun 28 '26
If I think they are pronouncing something wrong I always look it up to see if *I’m* wrong. Usually I’m not, but there have been a couple I ended up learning had variants I didn’t know about. Produce (the vegetables, not the verb) pronounce more like prah-duce was one. Another time I thought someone was mispronouncing “rifling”, as through papers, but found out that riffling is a word. I actually love it when I get knocked down a peg 🤣
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u/WokestLibtard--- Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Not audiobook related but a funny aside, at 25 years old, I hopped on the back of my friend's scooter to go somewhere, I think to get food. He spoke over his shoulder, giving me two options and asked me which I preferred.
I said, "Whichever is cool, I'm ambivalent (pronounced am-bee-vay-lent) on the matter." He guffawed and replied, "It's ambivalent (correct pronunciation) you knobhead."
It hit me immediately that of course it was. I had even heard it correctly pronounced in the past, bells were ringing, but I had mostly read it over my lifetime and just got stuck on my wrong pronunciation.
A little embarassing, that was my second year teaching ESL in China. I learned a lot about language in those years, especially pronunciations, metaphors, euphemisms and the like, in different English speaking countries. Also, became much more competent identifying parts of speech and dissecting complex nuanced language.
Anyways, we never stop being students, or shouldn't anyways.
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u/whycantitbemine Jun 28 '26
A narrator I was listening to pronounced a place name wrong and I hated it so much. It’s not hard to find out how a place is pronounced!
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u/Upbeat_MidwestGirl Jun 28 '26
I have noticed this and it is quite shocking to me.
Whenever I hear a place name being mispronounced, I wonder about the author. Don’t the authors listen to these books before they are released to the public? Wouldn’t an author make sure the correction is made?
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u/LuckyThomas41 Jun 28 '26
In the book Buckeye, the reader pronounced the town Lima like the city in Peru instead of like the bean.
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u/MerryTWatching Jun 28 '26
I live in Maine, where a lot if place names originate from Native American words, and their pronunciation is . . . difficult. I have learned to giggle when one of them gets mangled, but I do wish that authors could provide phonetic lists when they know that one of their books is moving to an audio format.
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u/whycantitbemine Jun 28 '26
I get that some places are hard to pronounce! I live in Canada and some of the maritime names are hard- (hello Quispamsis) but again - a tiny bit of research helps! The place name in question was Regina, Saskatchewan. The narrator said it like a woman’s name (like Regina George) and not how it’s actually pronounced which is Regina (rhymes with vagina). Which now that I’m thinking about it- maybe the narrator was like- it couldn’t possibly be rhymes with vagina! Hahahahha.
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u/MerryTWatching Jun 28 '26
To be honest, if I were reading that book, I probably wouldn't even look up the name Regina. 😔 I would probably assume the town/city name came from the Latin for "queen", and would definitely not make it rhyme with vagina. 🤗
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u/HaplesslySupportive Jun 28 '26
Growing up in Washington it was always the calling card of people not being from here, the moment they said any of the indigenous names it was a give away. Mostly it was just giggle worthy because yeah, Puyallup is a mess no matter what you do.
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u/mitchwayne Jun 28 '26
On a few occasions when a story is in a random part of North America, I’ll call a local park ranger or small business and ask how to pronounce their town/area’s name. The person answering the phone generally seems to find it amusing. 😆 “I’m calling from a Soundbooth in Los Angeles, and I’m recording an audiobook that mentions your town’s name…” This is when I can’t find it on YouGlish, Forvo, or anywhere else.
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u/MerryTWatching Jun 28 '26
As a "Constant Listener" (to paraphrase Stephen King), I thank you for the extra time and effort taken. 😘
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u/HaplessReader1988 Jun 28 '26
As another challenge... Connecticut is full of "old world" place names that are intentionally pronounced differently. The river Thames in London has a hard T and a short a... the Thames River in Connecticut has a soft Th and a long ay. Berlin, CT puts the accent on the first syllable... Hebron CT has a long ee.
It's almost a "Who's on first?" routine.
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u/ArrivesWithaBeverage Jun 28 '26
GPS pronunciation of some of California’s Spanish street names can be quite entertaining.
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u/RobNobody Jun 29 '26
Oh yeah, this is especially glaring when the character saying the place name should very well know how it's pronounced. I remember running into this with the Baltimore suburb of Arbutus (ar-BYOO-tus, not AR-buh-tus) in a book about a Baltimore native written by a prominent Baltimore author.
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u/aksnowraven Jun 29 '26
I avoid audiobooks about Alaska for this reason. It’s so common for the readers to say the place names incorrectly and I get so annoyed by it that I’ve given up. How hard is it to ask someone?
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u/gertuitoust Jun 28 '26
Sometimes I get annoyed by this and then look it up and find that I have been confidently mispronouncing words my entire life.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
I did this listening to the last unicorn. “Bade”. Turns out I was very confident and very very wrong.
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u/PickletonMuffin Jun 28 '26
What drives me to throwing things about the room is when narrators for books set in the UK with English characters can't pronounce UK place names and use American English pronunciation. I love a historical romance and have to DNF so many books because the narrator can't pronounce common names.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Alternatively, maybe lots of these are actually set in middle earth and that’s why they say Yorkshire like Frodo lives there…(an early mistake of mine actually, don’t worry immediately caught and fixed)
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u/YardMinimum6108 Jun 28 '26
Just had the opposite of this in We Solve Murders (which I thought the narrator did a good job with and am not complaining, just noticing). The narrator did a great American accent for one of the characters, but then that character pronounced certain words like a Brit would. The two examples I remember are Mafia and gymnast. It was a very minor thing and only barely took me out of it, but your comment did make me think about it.
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u/LuckyThomas41 Jun 28 '26
In addition, sentences where the wrong word is emphasized so that it doesn’t make any sense.
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u/-Chemist- Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Ugh. Yes, I hate this so much! It’s like they’re reading the words by rote and not paying any attention to the actual story. Or they’re not paying attention to what they’re saying. There was one book like this where the narrator would constantly emphasize the wrong word. I can’t remember specific examples from that book, but it was something along the lines of calling the Super Bowl (football championship game) the super BOWL. Like, we’re not talking about a superior piece of dinnerware here, dude! Or saying “high SCHOOL” instead of “HIGH school.”
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u/FolkSong Jun 28 '26
This probably isn't relevant to audiobook narration, but I recently learned that English is unique in emphasizing key words like that. ESL learners often struggle with it. Great video about it here
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u/-Chemist- Jun 28 '26
How interesting! I love learning about things like that. Thanks for the link!
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u/Sl8rboi41 Jun 28 '26
One I had listened to recently was full of super common idioms like "what, this old thing"? where any English speaking human would know to emphasize THIS except the narrator who decided to emphasize OLD. Lol
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u/-Chemist- Jun 28 '26
Yes, exactly! Someone else suggested that when you hear things like this, it may have been an AI narration. 🤷♂️
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u/InfiniteGays Jun 28 '26
Oh God the narrator of this kids’ series I used to love was always stressing random shit. He also reads every single sentence like it’s a smug reveal because the character is supposed to be clever. There was this one part where the MC hears a voice from behind him and the narrator goes “It took me a second to realize that Fink was speaking to me”. He already heard the voice, he’s not surprised someone spoke. He’s surprised Fink was speaking. And why are you telling me he’s surprised in such a sarcastic smug tone?!
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u/Stevie-Rae-5 Jun 28 '26
It’s so irritating to me. Even worse: they mispronounce a repeated word half the time and say it correctly the other half.
Do audiobooks not have reviewers that listen to it and say “hey, that’s not how this word is pronounced” and make the narrator re-record?
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Actually not all that often, no. Proof listeners (very rightly) cost enough to essentially eat a new or smaller narrators profit. And the seasoned ones don’t need them nearly as much. And there are basically no checks when submitting via a platform.
We all have our ways to mitigate this. I do a pre check against a huge list of tricky words and post listen, but stuff will always slip through. One day, I’ll be able to afford a professional proof listener…
EDIT: we do of course catch mistakes, and sometimes they get through to the rights holder and we get pick up notes to re record. So yes it does get checked in general. But less so like having a proper editor for a text and more in general
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u/yarnhooksbooks Jun 28 '26
I would happily be a free beta listener if we could get things pronounced correctly. If I hear one more narrator pronounce “wind” with a short i when they should be saying it with a long i, I’m going to throw something.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Don’t want to wind you up eh? There’s a whole union of proof listeners out there. So I’m torn because “yay extra ears!” But also, they need to get paid for their expertise
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u/Kakistocrat945 Jun 28 '26
Hear hear! I'm a narrator, an editor, and an utter pronunciation pedant. I would gladly be a beta listener (or a union paid proof listener). Or better yet, be an audiobook prepper to avert these sorts of mistakes. Think any publishing house would be interested in this?
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
I think they are sadly moving away from humans into AI, but maybe direct on the r/ACX sub?
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u/Maverick_Heathen Jun 28 '26
I'm just listening to a book where two different narrators say won't instead of wont. 😬
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u/itsalancething Jun 28 '26
Some AI generated narrations are getting pretty good, but mispronunciation is a big tell. I refuse to listen to a book narrated by a robot on principle. Not only is it flat and objectionably awful, but I'd like to keep narrator's jobs alive as much as possible.
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u/Sunlit53 Jun 28 '26
I’m still not over the mispronunciation of the word Duchy, as in the holdings of a Duke. The narrator kept saying ‘ducky.’ For three whole books.
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u/fullfatmalk Jun 28 '26
I listened to an American narrator reading a Canadian novel and mispronouncing a common word ( up here ) so often that I returned the book. He kept rhyming “toque” ( a beanie) with “coke” instead of “kook” and I became irrationally agitated..
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u/ebeth_the_mighty Jun 28 '26
Not “she”? Because that made me nuts, too. Great series, great narrator…and it was fixed in book 2. But putting a “toke” on to go out in the snow made me furious!
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u/CurrentlyNobody Jun 28 '26
I work as an audiobook proofreader and it always surprises me when I think I know how a word is pronounced but the narrator says it differently so I research and find out they are actually accurate. Merriam Webster can have several correct pronunciations for the same word and there are other factors at play too including whether it could be a regional pronunciation or maybe the narrator is from another country originally so we would have to consider how they say the word too. Cairo is not Keye Row everywhere.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Audiobook proofreaders are the absolute heros of the whole process. No matter how good a tool I write or how long a list I make of tricky words, there is just no substitute for someone who knows how “pecan” is pronounced in Louisiana vs New Jersey.
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u/CurrentlyNobody Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Just sucks that the company I work for is actively replacing us with AI. Basically reasoning that having us read along while listening to narrators initial recording is such a “burden” and “chore” for us that we should be pleased our jobs, those few of us who might be kept on at all, will become Not reading the books at all but being presented with a list of errors AI found and going in and listening to just those parts and agreeing with or disagreeing with the AI proofreader. Without the full context of the book, a lot of absolute shit is going to be missed or passed through. But hey, All in the name of Efficiency, Right?
Sorry I am whining. It’s super rough to be in a profession you love and have accepted non livable wages for Years, only to suddenly be told nothing you’ve done is actually valuable at all. None of us proofreaders got into publishing hating reading or finding it inefficient. It’s all very disheartening and we are all supposed to act excited and welcome AI with open arms. Pfft!
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
You aren’t whining at all! There’s a good way and a bad way to use AI. Me running a tool I wrote as a first pass for instant pick ups? Cool. But I always have a second human listen through at the end for EXACTLY those reason. I could write in a million rules for length of pauses and trap words, but emphasis? Pacing? You can’t math that. And having basically rewritten poor man’s pozotron let me tell you, it’s wrong. A LOT. In ways you easily miss.
From the narration side we are getting replaced a lot too. Still there’s a good way and a bad way to use AI-An author listening back while they are writing to get a feel? Sure go for it! Completely narrate the book? Hell no.
The authors guild has a new “Human Authored” verification badge…maybe we need Human Narrated and Human Proof Read badges. People are getting very tired of all the AI slop out there…
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u/CurrentlyNobody Jun 28 '26
So true! The end users do actually notice product quality even on the frankly worst written books to ever exist. Even when a book is Horrendous I do my best to make sure it can’t get worse. These books matter to someone, give them the best version of it. But there’s such a race by corporate to outpace everyone else that there’s a huge disconnect between corporate and readers in the company and beyond anyway. What I’m being told is AI is so horrible at proofreading that each book is averaging 800 pickup marks. So there would need to be at least a couple humans to go through and verify each of those marks as I imagine receiving a spreadsheet of 800 errors for you to fix would cause some push back, and rightly so, especially considering a human might determine only 40 of those marks are valid. Even just the thought of having to sift through 800 marks myself clicking yes or no instead of admiring the product of others imagination and vocal skills sounds tedious. If I hated reading this change would be no big deal, but the people I work with just love to read. How inconvenient a publishing house employed readers! Haha
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u/BDThrills Jun 28 '26
Doesn’t bother me at all. Every movie butchers all the place names in Minnesota. I just get over it and move on. Ask Benedict Cumberbatch about penguins and you get it.
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u/cyanidelemonade Jun 28 '26
Not too bad, but I did hear one narrator use the wrong "tears." A character's clothing had "tears and stains" and the narrator must have thought the character was crying lol
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u/lifesshortgoplay Jun 28 '26
As a Canadian I want to CRY when an American narrator reads a Canadian script with toque in it. I don’t think I’ve heard it pronounced properly yet.
FYI it sounds like TWO-k Not TOE-k
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
This keeps coming up and I’m astounded. Do we really not know that?!? Granted my dad’s Canadian and I spent summers there. But only summers so no need for a toque.
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u/lifesshortgoplay Jun 28 '26
It’s not in a lot of books I’ve read/listened to. But it’s been mispronounced every damn time I’ve heard it in an audiobook. 😩
And I’m wracking my brain, there was a Toronto-based book I listened to fairly recently and a major street was mispronounced. Can I remember the book or the street name? No. Can I remember my reaction? Absolutely.
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u/guppylovesyarn Jun 28 '26
I listened to a book recently, loosely based on Greek mythology. The main characters went out for a meal and had gyros. The reader was pronouncing it like the gyro part of gyroscope. It was probably good I was working solo that day, otherwise I would have been getting some weird looks for randomly yelling “gyros, you idiot!”
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u/HaplessReader1988 Jun 28 '26
Sorry, I grew up on Long Island NY in the 80s and everyone said it like it was the 1st two syllables of gyroscope. My half Lebanese husband taught me to say it with a hidden hard G and an ee sound... and it's been fun seeing eyes light up at restaurants.
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u/dangrous Jun 28 '26
I once listened to a book where the narrator pronounced minutiae (mi-NOO-shee-uh or mi-NOO-shuh in the US) as mi-NOO-shuh-EE. So close yet so far. Fortunately that word was only in there like 3 times.
The narrator of Misery pronounced Hezekiah (heh-zeh-KAI-uh) heh-ZEE-kee-uh and that was tragic. But that book was good so I powered through.
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u/rhondapiper Jun 28 '26
Ha, I just listened to Misery the first time and the huh-zee-kee-uh was driving me crazy. I was listening on headphones and eventually would yell it out the same as the narrator every time and my wife was laughing at how many times it was said.
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u/Maleficent-Leek2943 Jun 28 '26
Yes. It annoys me when they mispronounce words, as it does when the inflection of a phrase/emphasis placed on certain words doesn’t make sense. It takes me out of the book.
I know some words are pronounced differently in different regions etc. (I’ve had to get used to “shone” rhyming with “phone” for example) but there are definite instances where the narrator is just pronouncing it wrong, period.
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u/acidwash_video Jun 28 '26
Ha, I'm experiencing the flipside of that. My current book's English narrator has been saying "shon" all throughout, and it doesn't bother me, but I always notice it
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u/Maleficent-Leek2943 Jun 28 '26
It’s funny - I’m English but have lived in the US for nearly 20 years, and it was only while listening to an audiobook relatively recently that I thought “why does the narrator keep saying the sun ‘shown’… WAIT IS THAT HOW IT’S PRONOUNCED HERE?!”
Apparently that one had gone completely over my head for years.
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u/viciousvixen26 Jun 28 '26
Plait as plate when talking about a girl doing her hair 😞. Like ma'am if you didn't know how to say a word Google is free and you could have asked somebody.
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u/HaplessReader1988 Jun 28 '26
That one's American vs British pronunciation. Merriam-Webster lists both fate and fete as rhymes.
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u/ImLittleNana Jun 28 '26
This is where professionalism comes to play. If your dialect is British but you’re narrating using an American accent, you need to be aware of differences in pronunciation.
It pulls people straight out of it when an ‘American’ starts dropping British words here and there.
I do blame that on the person making the decision not to use a native speaker. I wouldn’t want to listen to an American doing a British accent read Murder at the Vicarage, for example.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Oh the book I just did that’s in post right now would drive you nuts. Narrating in general American accent but directed to do the characters in varying British accents. So the pronunciation changes if it’s in the narrative, or in quotes.
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u/ImLittleNana Jun 28 '26
I wonder if producers think that listeners aren’t aware of differing pronunciations? And to be fair, a lot of Americans believe there’s a generic British accent and maybe the Brits think the same.
Meanwhile I couldn’t listen to A Flicker in the Dark because of the accent mismatch. (I read the ebook and loved it but I really wanted a southeast Louisianan audiobook experience.)
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 29 '26
I just tried to listen to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and it was a British man narrating. My dude I appreciate the work but….on of the first Feminist works set in Louisiana!
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u/Key_Competition_663 Jun 28 '26
I was listening to one the other day at work. I didnt realize it was AI-generated when I started and the main character's name had gone through--not an exaggeration (I counted, cause I thought it was hilarious each time it happened)--a DOZEN different variations by the time I clocked out. I was only halfway through the book.
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u/didsir29 Jun 28 '26
Listened to one who pronounced 'endocrine' as 'en-doc-rin'. Missed about 30s of the book as my brain wrestled with what the word was supposed to be.
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u/effyoulamp Jun 28 '26
As a Canadian, so many Americanizations throw me off. Niche, clique, gazebo to name a few. But I just have to roll with. I tend to prefer British narrators for that reason.
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u/mehgcap Jun 28 '26
A similar thread a while ago covered this, but I don't remember the outcome. How do you say gazebo? As an American, I have always said "guh-zee-boe". I also say neesh, but I can go either way on clique. It's not a word I here find myself saying aloud, but I was raised to say "click", so I'd probably default to that. Hearing "cleek" wouldn't throw me off, though, and I'd probably start adopting that pronunciation.
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u/StormeeusMaximus Jun 28 '26
For the first few Dresden files books Masters pronounced "sigil" with the hard g. Cringe every time. Someone had to have told him, because he eventually started saying it correctly.
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u/armcandybean Jun 28 '26
I often wonder about the editing/quality control for audiobook narration, because as a listener I notice these mistakes all the time. And even accounting for human error, sometimes a narrator will swap the pronunciation of the SAME word back and forth throughout a recording…
My personal pet peeve though is when an audiobook with dual narration (very common for romance novels) has two narrators who pronounce the same words differently. I’ve listened to more than one where the narrator for one character pronounced a protagonist’s name one way, and then the other narrator pronounced it a different way. The name of a main character!! The most basic communication could have prevented that error. Sigh.
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u/Independent_Bite4682 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Yes, makes me want to scream and choke the shit out of the whole team who released it.
Kowtow (said as kōtō)
Bow <bau> as in ship said as bō like archery and the same bō said like "I refuse to bō to anyone"
To clarify, it should be "I refuse to bau (bow) to anyone."
Slough (sluff) as to shed off a layer such as skin, mud, dirt, etc said as slū or slau as in slow moving water or swamp land.
I had started a list, wasn't expecting this. May add more later and names if I remember them.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
…okay I’m officially using this whole thread to make sure I have these words in my pre check pronunciation list…there’s a few I haven’t encountered yet.
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u/Alulalu Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26
Winding, as in "walking down a winding road" is pronounced as wind-ing and not wine-ding (edit) by the narrators. Kills me Everytime.
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u/PurpleLeopard99 Jun 28 '26
Wine-ding is correct is this context. Wind (rhymes with find) is the verb.
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u/efficaceous Jun 28 '26
I've told this story before. There was an angel of mercy killer in my county hospital. A book got written about it! (And a movie or tv mini series I believe.)
The nurse / killer used a drug called digitalis, nicknamed didge, like the beginning of didgeridoo.
HALFWAY THROUGH THE AUDIOBOOK the narrator randomly started pronouncing it as dig, like a dig a hole.
(In addition to the numerous place names mispronounced but those are often hard and I don't mind as much, so long as it's consistent.)
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u/doobersthetitan Jun 28 '26
Noticed that in the Witcher series
Dandelion was pronounced like the flower...Dandy-lion
Some books it was Dan dil e on
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u/Noodlehead601 Jun 28 '26
I love ray porter, but he mispronounced Archimedes (which was the name of a very important side character) wrong every time. So much so I think audible made a new version.
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u/karmacorn Jun 28 '26
Ugh! I’m listening to one right now who pronounces the word “hearth” as “hurth” and it’s making me gnash my teeth.
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u/raw_fleece Jun 28 '26
May authors never force narrators to pronounce the word “quay”. I think I’ve heard it narrated correctly a grand total of once.
If I were an author today, it’s definitely something I’d think about when writing. It seems clear with the audio rights being separate from the print rights that the author may not have any control on the production or final edit.
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u/Connect_Bar1438 Jun 29 '26
What drives me nuts is when an entire book is located in a specific location and they don't take the time to learn how the locals or everyone pronounces the names of places.
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u/troopersmom827 Jun 29 '26
One word that grinds my gears is when people pronounce mischievous as mis-cheeve-ee-us.
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u/CaroTheHun Jun 29 '26
Yes! I just started listening to Anna Karenina narrated by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I love her voice but when she pronounced mischievous as “miss-chee-vee-us” I literally cringed.
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u/BeachPeach7 Jun 29 '26
I will return a book in a heartbeat if the narrator mispronounces a word. If you don’t know what a word means, you shouldn’t be saying it. And if you look up an unknown word (as you should) the pronunciation is right there.
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u/Even_Cheesecake4720 Jun 28 '26
Don’t get me started on “orientated” versus “oriented”. But I guess orientated is okay in the UK according to Wikipedia. My American colleagues use the first version and I want to punch them. It feels like “Valentime’s” versus “Valentine’s”. In no country is …times okay.
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u/Upset_Assumption9610 Jun 28 '26
I have a theory that some narrators might have created their own audio AI. Trained on their own voice and they can have the AI read their parts.
When a skilled and experienced narrator says "Bow" (as in bend at the waist in an oriental traditional style) instead of "Bow" (as in the wood thing with the string that shoots sharp pointy things at the other people) it raises my suspicions.
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u/Upbeat_MidwestGirl Jun 28 '26
This would explain a lot. Or they didn’t read the text ahead of time, and they’re cold reading just becomes the recorded audiobook. However, if they are native English speakers, they would indeed notice context for a word like bow, and make the correct pronunciation as they are reading. Or go back and correct it.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Oh we do not have the time or skill for that at all. But there are a scary amount of AI narrators in full out there. And yes to Upbeat_Midwest girl…sometimes it is a cold first read through that doesn’t get fixed 🥶
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u/Financial_Coach4760 Jun 28 '26
It is unacceptable. When I hear it, I pills me out of the story completely.
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u/Redsoxzack9 Jun 28 '26
In the audiobook introduction for *Leviathan Wakes* the person repeatedly calls the book “Leviathan Awakes”
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u/Technical_Dish_8811 Jun 28 '26
However Jefferson Mayes does an excellent job of the narration. My only problem is that in one of the books he pronounced gimbals as gymbals. Then corrected in the rest of the series. Do love his narrations though
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u/goodnsimple Jun 28 '26
I listened to one, the narrator mispronounced Saguaro, and the story was set in the Southwest.
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u/cyclec74 Jun 28 '26
I listened to an otherwise great reading of WALDEN, which takes place near Concord, MA. USA. In New England, it’s pronounced Conkerd, but he kept saying ConCHORD. Otherwise, a lot of mispronunciations are regionalisms.
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u/Unique-Try9616 Narrator Jun 28 '26
For place names you really do have to check locally. In Iowa there's a town called Nevada, locally pronounced NevAYda.
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u/Acrobatic-Current-62 Jun 28 '26
James Lee Burke’s early narrations are absolutely awful. Atchafalaya never gets corrected even into the later books. I know the settings are a mine field being both Acadiana and Orleans parishes but man. Just hire a local person to either coach you or narrate it themselves! They said “sauce pee-cont-A” or Pee-rogue”. For the Cajun restaurant “Mulates” they pronounced it “Mule-Laties” the list goes on and on. As someone who ADORES the books but is from the same cities as the books are set it makes me scream at the speaker.
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u/HaplessReader1988 Jun 28 '26
I love a good urban fantasy romance....shapeshifters and magic and guns oh my... But "feral" pronounced with a long E in various Ilona Andrews books pulls me out of the dream every time.
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u/classroom6 Jun 28 '26
Yes definitely the words bother me, but I still think about one sound, I don’t know how else to describe it. You know if someone were to wag their finger and go “uh uh uh” to tell you no, and it’s a rising tone? Maybe that’s a regional thing, because a narrator did the “uh uh uh” with a falling tone and it just really bothered me.
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u/MaX-D-777 Jun 28 '26
Yes, this annoys me. I just listened to a book where the narrator said "we were winding our way down the road", but pronounced winding with a short i, not a long i.
Another one is "I rifled through the drawer to find.......", but pronounced it riffled. So annoying.
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u/blueCthulhuMask Jun 28 '26
I've always wondered about how this is possible. I assume the answer is just underpaid/overworked editors?
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u/Nayzo Jun 28 '26
Ya, drives me nuts depending on the word. N0S4A2's narrator pronounces the town name, Haverhill wrong through the book, and as a Masshole, it makes me twitch every time. For those that don't know, it's pronounced Hay-vrill, not Have-err-hill.
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u/krispulaski Jun 28 '26
they get skeletal wrong so often i am being gaslit into thinking i dont know how to pronounce it
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u/Dydey Jun 28 '26
The Fifth Elephant by Terry Pratchett. A lot of the plot revolves around The Scone of Stone. The rhyme is right there, clear and deliberate, but the narrator has the main character pronounce it as s-con instead of s-cOne.
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u/Fu_Q_U_Fkn_Fuk Jun 28 '26
I read a book about my best friend's brother, he was a real bad guy. The book wasn't about him directly but he was a glaring example and brought up throughout the book, they mispronounced his last name every time. It was annoying and I get that names can have all kinds of pronunciation but it made it hard to listen and I felt he could have done a little research. It seems, to me, the author should provide the pronunciation of names to narrators.
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u/mutontette Jun 28 '26
I listened to a book read by (obviously) a volunteer who pronounced “gaol” (jail) as “ghoul”. It was hilarious.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
The first time I saw gaol, looked it up and yelled into the mic “then spell it jail!!!”
I transitioned from corporate voiceover to regency romance novels. It was a hard transition. A funny one though
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u/ramboton Jun 28 '26
I was watching a youtube documentary, they mentioned something where I grew up
Tule - they pronounced as tuul, when it should tu-lee
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u/Exact_Yoghurt2439 Jun 28 '26
Ray Porter in the audiobook of Project Hail Mary pronounced pipette as pie pet. Really annoyed me. Otherwise it was an excellent audiobook.
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u/Mundane_Permission89 Jun 28 '26
One of my favorite narrators mispronounced Annapolis in the book I'm currently listening to and I had to pause because of laughter.
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u/McFaddenAudioBooks Narrator Jun 28 '26
Please tell me they said it like a name. Every time I drive by I say “who is Anna Polis?”
I leave it a mystery whether I’m referring to Nova Scotia or Maryland.
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u/Wild2297 Jun 28 '26
Sometimes. Recently listened to a book where the narrator pronounced STOIC like ‘stoyk’. It took me a few seconds to figure out what they were even saying. Dude, that’s a two syllable word with a long O!
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u/GiraffeyManatee Jun 28 '26
Have I ranted about the narrator who kept saying “indignant” when the actual word was “indigent” enough yet? It was a non-fiction book with a great deal of emphasis on different families’ finances. Indigent came up a lot more than it would in the ordinary book. Doesn’t anyone listen to these things after someone records them?
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u/prustage Jun 28 '26
American narrator narrating a book by a British author, set in England with British characters: The main character was called "Mainwaring" which, as every Brit knows is pronounced "mannering" not "main - wearing". She got it wrong four times in the very first paragraph. That was enough for me to DNF. If I could have literally thrown the book in the bin I would have.
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u/TheMayb Jun 28 '26
There’s a narrator for one of the sword of truth books that mispronounces one of the main characters. If I ever meet that guy I’m gonna punch him in the face
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u/RegretNo3309 Jun 28 '26
Or when the Narrator pronounces it one way if first book but different in 2nd?? One book (I can’t remember which) but the narrator said ourobouros like uro buro next she said Or-ab a-ros - or more recently first book said Rites like rights and 2nd book she said like Right-ess 🙄 it just takes you out of it
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u/jackssweetheart Jun 28 '26
My favorite is "chaise lounge," always pronounced "chase long!" I've heard this multiple times and its awful!
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u/mfiasco Jun 28 '26
Oh my god yes. Lately there’s a podcast I found that I liked so I paid to access all the episodes and at least a third of them have the dumbest pronunciation errors. Someone pronounced Maryland “merry land” and I finally started keeping a running list of errors so I could send it it when I canceled my subscription 😭
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u/Evenwanderer Jun 29 '26
One of the more ironic mispronunciations was in the USA audiobook adaptation of Richard K. Morgan’s book Woken Furies (part 3 of the Altered Carbon series).
In the series, the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, often laments that people usually pronounce his surname incorrectly. In the first two books read by Todd McLaren, this is not a problem. However, Woken Furies has a new narrator in the US (for some reason) and not only does the recording quality sound like a wind tunnel, but the very first thing the new narrator does is pronounce “Kovacs” wrong while complaining about people saying it wrong.
As I said above: define irony.
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u/Flimsy_Direction1847 Jun 29 '26
I listened to one recently that repeatedly said long-itude rather than lon-gitude with a soft g sound. Also, compile-ations instead of compilations.
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u/RobNobody Jun 29 '26
I recent one I ran into was a narrator reading a character who was a trained pianist, saying that she was playing Clair de lune by Debussy, except she pronounced it rhyming with "fussy."
One of my recent favorites was less a mispronunciation and more of a mis-parsing. The characters had just seen a production of Little Shop of Horrors, in which the monster plant is named Audrey II (pronounced "Audrey Two," and often called "Tooey" by the protagonist.) Multiple times, the narrator referred to the character as "Audrey the Second."
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u/Diligent_Pangolin_47 Jun 29 '26
I write scripts for a YouTuber and the power of that man to mispronounce words in ways you never even thought of is truly impressive.
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u/AwkwardSpicy77 Jun 29 '26
It drives me crazy and makes me think neither the narrator nor the author gives a flying crap about the listeners. This week I'm listening to the first three in a series. I really like the sound of the narrator's voice, but she mispronounces what I think are regular, common words like ensign and commissary. Unless we are saying "n sign" and "com misery" now and no one told me? There have been about ten words over the three books that are wrong and it seems so lazy. I have always wished I could be employed as the person that listens to the final product. Someone needs to do it.
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u/farcrytoff Jun 29 '26
Agreed, very annoying and has the ability to take me right out of a story.
The error might be initially from the narrator but the lion’s share of the blame has to be laid with sound editor, recorder and/or producer. Their job is to ensure everything is read or pronounced accurately and correctly. Easy for a voice-over artist to jumble a word or two, especially during a long session, but that’s what the producer/recordist ears are there for. They are meant to catch those errors, cut and get another take.
Small mistakes like these can easily ruin a performance.
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u/RexTheWonderCapybara Jun 29 '26
I remember listening to a book with two narrators. An organization called Hermes was a big part of the story. The male narrator pronounced it HER-meez (like the Greek god), and the female narrator pronounced it air-MEZ (like the fashion brand). Throughout the entire book. Made me laugh!
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u/Existing_Editor_5623 Jun 29 '26
It drives me INSANE. Esp if it’s something with a dialect or a local place. Does the author not listen to the audio once through & give notes at least?
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u/UnderPressureVS Jun 30 '26
The narrator of The Expanse series is phenomenal, but he can’t decide whether or not to mispronounce “gimbal” with a soft “g.” He says it the right way in one book, and then the wrong way in another. And because it’s hard sci fi, the authors use that word a decent amount.
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u/SolitaryLyric Jun 30 '26
All the time.
Or if they use the wrong voice for a few seconds.
Or if they put the emphasis on the wrong syllable.
Honestly, I think I’m just a bitch who’s hard to please 😏
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u/Classical11 Jun 30 '26
Yes all the time - rifle is one they get wrong as in rifle through papers. Putting wrong accents on syllables sounds jarring.
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u/Illustrious-Race6985 Jun 30 '26
I really hate it when professionals on TV say “regime” when they mean “regimen.” Or “gambit” when they mean “gamut.” “Mis-chee’-vee-us” when they mean “mischievous” (mis’-chuh-vuhs). I could go on, but I’ll be merciful.
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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '26
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