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Some Americans struggled with pronunciation as they kept up with this year’s news, from the election of Zoharan Mamdani to the conspiracies surrounding the jewelry theft at the Louvre.
It has put the names of both the incoming mayor of New York City and a famous Paris museum on the list of most mispronounced words in 2025.
Language learning company Babbel and closed-captioning company The Captioning Group on Thursday released a list of the words that caused news anchors, politicians and other public figures in the US the most trouble this year, giving an overview of the people and topics Americans were talking about.
As Mamdani made his political rise, the name of the democratic socialist was often vilified. When he takes office in January, the 34-year-old will become the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first born in Africa and the first of South Asian heritage.
Babbel said her name – which should be pronounced ZOH-RAHN mam-DAH-nee – was most commonly mispronounced when people swapped the “m” and “n” in her last name.
Mamdani has said that he does not mind if someone tries to pronounce his name correctly and misses it, but some people deliberately mispronounce it. During a debate in the mayoral race, he criticized the pronunciation of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s name, telling his opponent: “The name is Mamdani. Mamdani.”
The theft of France’s crown jewels from the Louvre in October led many to mispronounce the name of the world’s most visited museum. Babbel says the correct pronunciation is LOOV-ruh, with a very light accent on “ruh”, which can be a challenge for English speakers.
“A lot of these words come from different languages and so we have to adapt to sounds we have never made before,” said Esteban Touma, linguistic and cultural expert at Babbel.
Other words and names on the list include:
Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, is pronounced uh-SEE-tuh-MIH-nuh-phen. President Donald Trump gave comedians plenty of material when he stumbled upon the term as he told pregnant women to avoid taking painkillers, despite inconclusive evidence about whether too many might be linked to autism.
– Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina lawyer who was sentenced to life in prison in 2021 for the fatal shootings of his wife and son, has been declared AL-ick MUR-dock. The case was dramatized into a series on Hulu this year.
-Monjaro, pronounced maun-JAHR-oh, is part of a wave of diabetes and obesity drugs that have risen in popularity as people lose weight while taking the injections.
Several words from the US list, including Louvre and Monjaro, also made the list for the UK, which was compiled by Babel and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, an organization for subtitling professionals. Storm Iovine, which devastated Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland in January, put that name on the UK list. Babbel says the correct pronunciation is aye-OH-win, said with a three-beat pattern.
Throughout the year, captioners pay attention to words that come up frequently, are difficult to pronounce, spell, or are newly emerging. Babbel’s linguists also keep an eye out for new pronunciation challenges.
In the pronunciation surprise of the year, actor Denzel Washington told late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel that he was named after his father and that their first names are actually pronounced Den-zul. But, he said, it became confusing so his mother decided to pronounce her son’s name as Den-zelle.