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From the rise of Zohran Mamdani to the jewel heist at the Louvre, some of 2025’s biggest news moments left many Americans wrestling with pronunciations. A new list released by language-learning platform Babbel and closed-captioning company The Captioning Group highlights the words, names and places most commonly mispronounced by public figures in the US this year.
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Mamdani — New York City’s mayor-elect and a democratic socialist — topped the list. At 34, he is set to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, the first born in Africa and the first of South Asian heritage. His name, correctly pronounced zoh-RAHN mam-DAH-nee, was often fumbled, with many people inadvertently swapping the “M” and “N” in his surname. Mamdani has said he doesn’t mind well-intentioned errors, but has called out deliberate mispronunciations — even correcting former governor Andrew Cuomo during a debate: “The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I.”
The dramatic October theft of France’s crown jewels from the Louvre museum also triggered a wave of pronunciation mishaps. Babbel notes that the world-famous museum’s name should be said as LOOV-ruh, with a soft “ruh” that English speakers often struggle to reproduce. “A lot of these words come from different languages, and we have to adapt to a sound we’ve never made before,” said Esteban Touma, a linguistic and cultural expert at Babbel.
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Labubu , the cult collectible toy that drove everyone into a collective frenzy this year was also on the list of mispronounced words with it’s correct pronunciation being “luh–BOO–boo” and not the widely used “la-bu-bu”.
The list spans everything from pharmaceuticals to pop-culture figures:
Acetaminophen — the active ingredient in Tylenol, is pronounced uh-SEE-tuh-MIH-nuh-fen. President Donald Trump went viral earlier this year after stumbling over the word while advising pregnant women to avoid excessive use of the painkiller.
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Alex Murdaughthe disgraced South Carolina attorney sentenced to life for the 2021 murders of his wife and son, is pronounced AL-ick MUR-dock. Renewed interest in the case followed a Hulu dramatization.
Mounjaroa diabetes and obesity drug at the centre of a weight-loss boom, is pronounced mown-JAHR-oh.
Several entries overlap with the UK’s mispronunciation list, including Louvre and Mounjaro. Storm Éowyn, which struck Ireland and parts of the UK in January, prompted widespread confusion. Babbel says the correct pronunciation is ay-OH-win, with a three-beat stress pattern.
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Throughout the year, captioners log words that consistently trip people up — whether because they are new, hard to spell or linguistically unfamiliar. Babbel’s linguists similarly track pronunciation trends as they emerge.
One of the year’s standout surprises came from actor Denzel Washington, who revealed on Jimmy Kimmel’s show that his name is actually pronounced DEN-zul — the same as his father’s. The family later opted for the more familiar Den-ZELLE to avoid confusion.
(with Inputs from Associated Press)
