Saturday, 19 February 2022

A slice of cannonbear cheese with your glass of wine?

Foreign food names can make life very difficult for monolingual Anglo Saxons - and linguistically challenged gourmets around the world. 

While just about everyone can get their head around pizza and satay; Australians (and many others) find several hard-to-pronounce (and spell) words in the kitchen and on restaurant menus. 

The experts at Top10 Meal Deliveries decided to discover if there is a correlation between mispronouncing and misspelling famous foods by analysing global search trend data from Google with help from Ahrefs.

Out of all the most commonly mispronounced foods, gnocchi (nyoh-key) is the most misspelled with 295,800 searches a month for gnocci (170,000), gnochi (118,000) and gnochhi (7,800).

Bruschetta (bru-sketta) is another commonly mispronounced food, along with kombucha, daiquiri, prosciutto, macaron, and camembert, which, believe it or not, is frequently searched for as cannonbear.

I also remember being offered some horse rubbish (horseradish) with a steak dish in Asia.

Italian foods are clearly the toughest to spell, while tzatziki, chipotle and phở all missed out on making the list. 

But at least Australians can pronounce Worcestershire sauce; a feat which is beyond most Americans.  

A link to the original data can be found here.


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