The English Oracle

Is there a word for words that people are more likely to have read than heard, thus don't know how to pronounce?

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Chapters
00:00 Is There A Word For Words That People Are More Likely To Have Read Than Heard, Thus Don'T Know H
00:33 Answer 1 Score 4
01:20 Accepted Answer Score 6
01:52 Answer 3 Score 1
02:13 Thank you

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Full question
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Tags
#singlewordrequests #phraserequests #pronunciation

#avk47



ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 6


In Judith Wynn Halsted's book Some of My Best Friends Are Books, a guide for teaching gifted readers, she references this phenomenon and calls it calley-ope syndrome (playing on how someone who has seen but not heard the word "calliope" would assume it was pronounced).

"Books that contain pronunciation guides are helpful for gifted readers (though they are rare, and a pleasant surprise when found), since so many avid readers know words only from reading and therefore mispronounce them. One excellent teacher of gifted high school students calls this 'The Calley-ope (calliope) Syndrome."

--Some of My Best Friends Are Books




ANSWER 2

Score 4


When a word has a primacy in its written form over its spoken form, such a scenario is termed as 'ocularcentrism'.

Ocularcentrism:the privileging of vision over the other senses.

From Oxford Reference

"A perceptual and epistemological bias ranking vision over other senses in Western cultures. An example would be a preference for the written word rather than the spoken word (in which case, it would be the opposite of phonocentrism). Both Plato and Aristotle gave primacy to sight and associated it with reason. We say that ‘seeing is believing’, ‘see for yourself’, and ‘I'll believe it when I see it with my own eyes’. When we understand we say, ‘I see’. We ‘see eye to eye’ when we agree. We imagine situations ‘in the mind's eye’.




ANSWER 3

Score 1


My 9 year old daughter and I found this page after doing a Bing search for this question. She has actually invented a wolf for words you read but don't know how to pronounce. A word like that is a "suitanam" (pronounced "suit-ah-nahm"). We think it's as good of a word as any so let's tell the dictionary people!