How do you pronounce Omicron? It's one of the most mispronounced words of 2021.
How do you pronounce Omicron, the new COVID-19 variant that has set off alarm bells worldwide and raised questions about vaccine effectiveness?
According to Merriam Webster, Omicron is pronounced "OH-muh-kraan" or "AH-muh-kraan." In British English, it is "OH-my-kraan."
The New Oxford English Dictionary, however, offers a different pronunciation, Dr. Andreas Willi, a comparative linguistics professor at Oxford University, told The New York Times: "Namely rather like an English phrase 'o-MIKE-Ron,'" he said.
The word made it onto this year's list of most mispronounced words, as compiled by the U.S. Captioning Company, which captions and subtitles real-time events on TV and in courtrooms.
The list, which was released on Tuesday and was compiled by the language-learning platform Babbel, identifies the words that proved most challenging for newsreaders and people on television to pronounce this year.
Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Billie Eilish, Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, and Dogecoin also made this year's list, as did Ethereum and Chipotle.
"Newscasters in the U.S. have struggled with 2021′s new words and names while reporting on key sporting events, viral internet trends and emerging celebrities," said Esteban Touma, a standup comedian and teacher for Babbel Live.
"As a language teacher, it's always interesting to see that some of these terms are usually new colloquialisms, or are rooted or borrowed from another language," he said. "As a non-native speaker, I must confess it's fun to see English speakers stumbling a bit for a change."
See the full list of the most mispronounced words here.
