Pronouncing vichyssoise is a lot easier than spelling it.
Pronouncing vichyssoise is a lot easier than spelling it.

The 20 Most Commonly Mispronounced Food Words

I will never forget attempting to teach my ex-husband, a Brit who found himself confronted with cross-cultural confusion at every turn ("That is not a biscuit; it's a cookie." "You can't call a woman a 'silly c*nt' or she will slap you."), how to pronounce the word taco. As a Texan it's not a word we tend to over-think. But my ex could never quite grasp it and continues to call this omnipresent food a "tack-oh" to this day.

Of course, it was he who finally taught me the proper way to pronounce Worcestershire sauce, despite being confused that we insist on adding the -shire suffix to it; back in England, it's simply called Worcester sauce, pronounced "wooh-ster" sauce.

There are still words that, even as a food critic, occasionally trip me up when I run across them. Running into cachaça for the first time stumped me, and I still don't know whether I should say "en-dive" or "ahn-deev" when referring that tasty chicory.

We polled our readers for their most commonly mispronounced words, and I wasn't surprised to see that French food terms -- this applies to Cajun foodstuffs, too -- top the list for confusion. "Brunoise, vichyssoise, anything French and ending in -se," as EOW blogger Nicholas L. Hall put it, still trip up diners after all these years.

Making chipotle peppers at home.
Making chipotle peppers at home.
Photo by Cait

At the risk of sounding pedantic, as reader Daniel Glover pointed out, "You have to have a happy medium though, or you just spend an entire food conversation trying to say every term with an appropriate pronunciation in various accents and it can get tedious and annoying."

This is exemplified by the otherwise lovely Giada De Laurentiis. My friend Nada put it best: "I get annoyed with Giada from the Food Network and her need to pronounce everything correctly." And unless you -- like my ex -- want to run the risk of getting slapped, be very careful if you decide to correct someone who's saying any of the following words incorrectly.



Bánh mì: This popular Vietnamese sandwich is just as popularly butchered, pronunciation-wise as "ban mee" or "bang mee." Proper pronunciation: bahn mee (this is as close as many of us will get to the difficult diphthongs in the Vietnamese language; hear it yourself here).

Pho: This Vietnamese soup is pronounced almost exactly like the French word for fire, feu, for which it's named. It is not "foe." Again, with dipthongs it's difficult to get it exactly right, but you'll get close. Proper pronunciation: fəʊ, or like the word "fur" without the "R" at the end.


Foie gras en terrine.
Foie gras en terrine.





Açai berry: As with cachaça, the trick with Açai is in the cé cédille (that "C" with a tail on it) that's pronounced as a soft "S" instead of a hard "C" sound. Proper pronunciation: ah-sigh-ee.

Those are beignets back there.
Those are beignets back there.
Photo by Marleigh






Bruschetta topped with tomatoes, capers and onions.
Bruschetta topped with tomatoes, capers and onions.
Photo by penguincakes






And if these weren't enough, check out our list of 20 more commonly mispronounced food words, including a tutorial on the difference between macarons and macaroons.

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