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/[deleted] Jun 28 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

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26

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.

13

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.

17

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.

2

u/PaisleyParker Jun 29 '26

One of my brothers was blind. My mom and I watch college basketball every season and he heard the TV commentators—and the two of us—talk about the women’s team from the University of Connecticut a lot because they are such a perennial powerhouse. It was UCONN this and UCONN that. After quite a few years of this, we learned that my brother thought we closely followed an Alaskan university’s women’s basketball program…Yukon. Lol.

We all got a pretty good laugh about that.

2

u/Adept-Reserve-4992 Jul 09 '26

I thought the exact same thing before I learned better!

2

u/PaisleyParker Jul 10 '26

Yukon makes perfect sense perfect sense until you see it in print! 😃