Those paying attention to New York politics this fall (basically everyone, it seemed) couldn’t help but notice that Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani often saw his name mispronounced, misspelled, and generally mangled. All the same, he went from one percent name recognition to the winning candidate, beating by a wide margin former governor Andrew Cuomo. It got so bad that the mayor-elect even scolded the former governor during a debate, saying, “The name is Mamdani. M-A-M-D-A-N-I.” (Even so, Cuomo stubbornly carried on, even misspelling Mamdani’s surname “Mamadani” in written social media posts, reflecting either bizarre carelessness or racist trolling.)
The other big story of the fall was the $102 million jewel heist at Paris’s Louvre Museum. You might not connect Mamdani’s campaign with the daring daylight heist, but the world’s most popular museum and the world’s (arguably) most talked-about politician are connected by one thing: the robbery revealed many people’s inexpertise in French pronunciation, meaning that the most-visited museum may have the most mispronounced name. Louvre is properly pronounced LOO-vruh, with the R expressed with a soft, guttural sound at the back of the throat; if the guttural R is tough, you can get away with just saying “loov.”
The origins of the museum’s name, by the way, aren’t entirely clear. The Grand Larousse encyclopedia posits that the name derives from an association with a wolf hunting den, the Latin for wolf being lupus.
Both the politician and the Paris museum appear on the American version of a list of the most mispronounced words of 2025, released Thursday by language-learning company Babbel and closed-captioning company the Captioning Group (for whom rampant mispronunciations must surely be a major headache). The Louvre also made the UK version of the list, compiled by Babbel and the British Institute of Verbatim Reporters, an association of subtitling professionals.
“A lot of these words come from different languages and so we have to adapt to a sound that we’ve never made before,” Esteban Touma, a linguistic and cultural expert at Babbel, told the Associated Press.
Zohran Mamdani.
Stephani Spindel/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images
One real surprise came courtesy of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Denzel Washington, who told late-night host Jimmy Kimmel this year that his name would normally be pronounced DEN-zul, but that because he was named after his father, his mother introduced the pronunciation den-ZEL to differentiate fils from père, and it stuck.
Possibly the most comical and at the same time disturbing occasion for an addition to the list was U.S. president Donald Trump’s September 22 press conference at which he spread disinformation claiming that the widely used medicine acetaminophen (uh-SEE-tuh-MIH-nuh-fen), when taken by pregnant mothers, may cause autism in their children. He stumbled badly over the pronunciation of the medicine, revealing that in a press conference on the crucial matter of public health, he plainly couldn’t be bothered to read the script ahead of time, much less rehearse the difficult words.
