These 10 Words Don’t Mean Anything Close to What They Look Like

These words can be quite confusing!

We’re all familiar with the onomatopoeia—a word that phonetically mimics what it describes (e.g. “plop,” “achoo,” “oink,” etc). And we all know that some words—like “hysterical” “ecstatic,” and “austere,” etc, even manage to look like what they describe, somehow. But what happens when language neither sounds nor looks like its meaning? Below are some examples of words (some familiar, some obscure to the point of being practically obsolete) that most certainly do not mean what their appearance might suggest.

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