From the election of Zohran Mamdani to the intrigue surrounding the jewel heist at the Louvre, keeping up with this year's news also left some Americans struggling with pronunciations. That's put both the name of New York City's incoming mayor and the famed Paris museum on a list of the most mispronounced words in 2025.
The language-learning company Babbel and closed-captioning company The Captioning Group on Thursday released a list of the words that news anchors, politicians and other public figures in the U.S. struggled with the most this year, giving an overview of the people and topics that had Americans talking.
As Mamdani made his political rise, the democratic socialist's name often was mangled. When he takes office in January, the 34-year-old will become the city’s first Muslim mayor, first born in Africa and first of South Asian heritage. Babbel said his name - which should be pronounced zoh-RAHN mam-DAH-nee - was most commonly mispronounced when people swapped the "M” and "N” in his last name.
Mamdani has said he doesn't mind if someone tries to pronounce his name correctly and misses but that some mispronounce it intentionally. During one mayoral race debate, he chided former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's pronunciation of his name, telling his opponent: "The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I.”
The theft of France’s crown jewels from the Louvre in October had many people mispronouncing the name of the world’s most-visited museum. Babbel says the correct pronunciation is LOOV-ruh, with a very soft pronunciation on the "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 a sound that we’ve never made before,” said Esteban Touma, a linguistic and cultural expert at Babbel.
Other words and names on the list include:
– Acetaminophen, the active ingredient in the Tylenol, is pronounced uh-SEE-tuh-MIH-nuh-fen. President Donald Trump gave comedians plenty of material when he stumbled over the word as he implored pregnant women to avoid taking the painkiller despite inconclusive evidence about whether too much could be linked to autism.
– Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina attorney who was sentenced to life in prison for the 2021 fatal shootings of his wife and son, is pronounced AL-ick MUR-dock. This year the case was dramatized in a series on Hulu.
– Mounjaro, pronounced mown-JAHR-OH, is part of a wave of diabetes and obesity medications that soared in popularity because of the weight people have lost while taking the injections.
Several words on the U.S. list, including Louvre and Mounjaro, also made the list for the U.K., which was compiled by Babbel and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, an organization for subtitling professionals. Storm Eowyn, which battered Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland in January, put that name on the U.K. list. Babbel says the correct pronunciation is ay-OH-win, said with a three-beat pattern.
Throughout the year, captioners note words that come up over and over as difficult to pronounce, spell or are newly emerging. Linguists at Babbel also track new pronunciation challenges they see.
In a pronunciation surprise of the year, actor Denzel Washington told late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel that he was named after his father and their first names are actually pronounced DEN-zul. But, he said, that became confusing, so his mother decided to pronounce her son's name Den-ZELLE.
