The 20 International Foods Most Commonly Mispronounced by Americans

One of the perks of traveling and sight-seeing—or of eating out in a big city or a food festival—is the opportunity to try dishes from countries and cultures far outside your own. Of course, some international dishes have proved popular enough to become all but everyday staples around the world, so you’re now just as likely to see ciabatta or tzatziki on the menu in your local sandwich shop as you are in a restaurant in Italy or Greece.

An unfortunate pitfall of trying and adopting international foods, though, is that many of us English speakers aren’t all that confident when it comes to tackling their equally international names. And now, a new study by language-learning website Preply has uncovered the top 20 most frequently mispronounced international foods among Americans (along with guidelines on how to pronounce them).

Building on another recent study Preply carried out into the phenomenon of language anxiety, the study’s authors took to Google to count the number of times Americans searched the prompts “how to pronounce [the name of a food],” “how to say [the name of a food],” and “[the name of a food] pronunciation.” With these figures added together, the foods in question were then ranked by the total quantity of search volume their tricky pronunciations had elicited among Americans.

1. A Deep Dive into the Top 5
2. The 20 International Food Names Americans Struggle to Pronounce 

A Deep Dive into the Top 5

Gyros

Gyros are Greek pita bread sandwich, often filled with meat and served with salad, vegetables, and yogurt. As for that name—which the survey discovered earns a staggering 81,000 Google searches every month—nope, that’s not a hard g. And even more trickily, English doesn’t really have a perfect equivalent of the sound in its original Greek that that letter g is meant to represent (which is a little like a cross between a “y” and a “zh”). According to Merriam-Webster, though, you can get away with either “YEE-ro” or “ZHEE-ro.” 

Açaí

The second food on Preply’s list of mispronunciations—açaí, the superfood berry used in ever-popular and uber-healthy açai bowls—earned a full 25,000 fewer Google searches every month than the No. 1 slot, with a total of 56,600. Still, pronouncing the word is no less tricky, especially because it manages to cram three syllables into just four letters: “ah-sah-EE.” 

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Pho

Coming in with an average of 39,000 Google searches per month, the Vietnamese meat and rice-noodle broth pho has been around in English since the 1930s, according to Merriam-Webster. We might have ditched its original diacritics for our letter o (the correct Vietnamese spelling would be phở), but we’ve nonetheless retained its Vietnamese pronunciation: pho doesn’t rhyme with foe, but should be pronounced simply as “fuh”—a little like the sound for gets cut down to in fast-paced conversation. 

Worcestershire Sauce

British place names are often notoriously tricky to pronounce among non-Brits, of course, but the fact that the English county of Worcestershire is famously home to an ever-popular relish-like sauce now found in kitchens and pantries across the globe has brought its minefield of a name to English speakers all over the world. The trick is not to get bogged down in all 14 of those letters, because Worcestershire is just pronounced “WUSS-tuh-shuh”—a pronunciation that earns it an average of 34,000 Google searches in the U.S. every month. 

Gnocchi

To a lot of English speakers, these pasta-like Italian potato dumplings are pronounced a little like the word knock just with a y added to the end of it. In the native Italian, though (and to more globally-minded English speakers, for that matter), there’s a hidden “y” sound in the middle of this name too: gnocchi is really more like “NYOH-kee,” than “NOH-kee,” a fact that earns it over 33,000 Google searches every month.

The 20 International Food Names Americans Struggle to Pronounce 

Elsewhere on Preply’s list, the rest of the top 10 was made up of quinoa (“KEEN-wah”) in sixth place, followed by caprese (“kuh-PREY-zey”), charcuterie (“shahr-KOO-tuh-ree”), macaron (“mack-uh-ROHN”), and the aforementioned Greek tzatziki (“TSAT-see-kee”). It was Italian names that came out on top the most frequently, however, with eight words making the final list: Alongside gnocchi and caprese salad, the survey ranked focaccia, bruschetta, ciabatta, prosciutto, mascarpone, and tiramisu in the Top 20 overall. See the full list below.