The Hardest English Words to Pronounce and What Makes Them Hard

Squirrel, sixth, comfortable, colonel: four mechanisms explain why the notoriously hard English words are hard, and how to take any of them apart.

Published on September 3, 2026

Direct answer

Hard words are not long words. They are words that make your mouth do something your first language never asked it to do, and the famous ones stack two or three of those demands into one short space. Squirrel has two syllables and defeats more learners than responsibility, which has six.

Four mechanisms cover almost the whole list: consonants that stack with no vowel between them, syllables that disappear in speech, spelling that points at a different word, and two liquids in the same breath. Once you can name which mechanism a word belongs to, you know what to practise.

Mechanism 1: consonants with no vowel between them

English lets consonants pile up in a way many languages do not. Sixth is /sɪksθ/, which is four consonants after one short vowel, and the last two are made in completely different places in the mouth.

• sixth /sɪksθ/, twelfths, strengths
• asked, texts, desks
• clothes /kləʊðz/, months, worlds

The failure is predictable: a vowel appears where none belongs, so asked becomes ask-ed and clothes becomes clo-thez. That extra vowel adds a syllable, and the syllable count is what a listener uses to identify the word.

The fix is mechanical rather than acoustic, and it is covered step by step in consonant clusters. The short version: build the ending on its own, then attach it.

Mechanism 2: the syllables that disappear

Some words are hard because the written form is a lie about the spoken one. English reduces unstressed vowels so heavily that they vanish, and words end up shorter than they look.

February belongs here too, with a first vowel that survives and a middle one that does not.

Learners who pronounce every written vowel are not making a sound error at all. Every individual sound can be correct while the word still comes out with one syllable too many, which is enough to slow a listener down. The mechanism behind it is word stress, and the vowel doing the disappearing is the one described in TH, schwa, and long vowels.

Mechanism 3: the spelling points somewhere else

A handful of words are hard for a reason that has nothing to do with your mouth: you have to know the answer before you can say it.

Thorough and through are worth saying next to each other. They share five letters and share nothing else: /ˈθʌr.ə/ has two syllables and /θruː/ has one.

Mechanism 4: an r and an l in the same word

This is the mechanism behind the two words that get nominated most often. English /ɹ/ is made with the tongue tip touching nothing at all, pulled back and slightly curled. /l/ is the opposite: the tip presses firmly against the ridge behind the top teeth. A word that demands both in one syllable asks the tongue to do two contradictory things in a fraction of a second.

• squirrel /ˈskwɪr.əl/
• rural /ˈrʊə.rəl/
• particularly, hierarchy, literally
• world /wɜːld/, girl

Slow these down until you can feel the tongue leave the roof of the mouth and then arrive at it. Speed comes after the movement is reliable, never before.

The list people ask about

Transcriptions from the Cambridge Dictionary.

Mischievous is the interesting one on that list. A very large number of English speakers say it with four syllables and stress on the second, and dictionaries record the three-syllable form as standard. If natives are split on a word, you have not failed at it.

Why this list is probably not your list

Lists like this one are built from what defeats speakers in general. Your list is built from your first language, and the two overlap less than you would expect.

What makes a sound hard is that your language does not use it to tell words apart. A Spanish speaker starts school with an added e, a Japanese speaker separates the consonants in strike, a Korean speaker meets /f/ and /v/ for the first time. None of that is on a general list of hard words, and all of it costs more clarity than squirrel ever will, because it happens in words you say every day.

That list is worth building before this one. The ten mistakes Spanish speakers make in English is the version for one first language, and the same exercise works for any other: record five sentences you actually say, and see which sounds go wrong more than once.

How to take a hard word apart

Step 1: find the stressed syllable and cut the rest down

Say the word slowly and mark the one syllable that carries the stress. Every other vowel in the word is a candidate for reduction, and in long words several of them disappear completely.

Comfortable has its stress on the first syllable, and the rest of the word collapses behind it. Once you know that, you stop trying to give the other three syllables their full value.

Step 2: build the word backwards from its ending

Start with the last syllable alone, then add the one before it, and keep going until the whole word is there. Endings are where words collapse, so building forwards means practising the easy part first.

For entrepreneur: -neur, then -preneur, then entrepreneur. The stress lands on that final syllable, which is exactly the part you built first.

Step 3: slow the consonant sequence down without adding a vowel

For a word like sixth or asked, say the consonants one at a time with a pause between them, then close the gaps. The pause must shrink to nothing without ever becoming a vowel.

If you hear a small uh creeping in, you are going too fast. Go back to the version with the pause.

Step 4: put the word back into the sentence you actually need

A word is only fixed when it survives inside a real sentence at normal speed. Record yourself saying the sentence and listen for whether the hard word slowed the rest of it down.

This is the step people skip. A word that is perfect in isolation and falls apart in I need to talk about our temperature readings has not been learned yet. Phonema is built for that check: you type the sentence you need and it tells you which word came out unclear.

Common questions

What is the hardest word to pronounce in English? There is no single hardest word, because difficulty depends on which sounds your first language allows. The words that defeat almost everyone are the ones that stack several problems at once, such as squirrel, sixth and entrepreneur.

Why is squirrel so hard to say? Squirrel puts an r and an l in the same short word with a vowel squeezed between them, so the tongue has to move from a position where it touches nothing to one where it touches the ridge behind the teeth, in one syllable.

How many syllables does comfortable have? Three in ordinary speech, not four. The vowel written in the second syllable disappears, so the word runs as COMF-ter-ble.

How do I practise a word I keep getting wrong? Build it from the end rather than the start, one sound at a time, and only put it back into your sentence once the ending is stable.

Related sounds

• ɹ — as in red
• l — as in light
• θ — as in think
• ʌ — as in cup