Chiaroscuro [kee-ahr-uh-SKYOOR-oh]
What: In art, the treatment of light and shade, often in dramatic contrast.
How you pronounce it: Chiaroscuro looks odd, sounds odd, and just doesn’t crop up in everyday conversation since it basically refers to the artistic technique of balancing dark and light, the interplay of light and shadow. It came into English from the Italian and is still pronounced the Italian way, with chiaro (clear, bright) joined to oscuro, (obscure, dark). But to pronounce it correctly, it’s easier to think of four English words set in a row: “key arrow skew row.”
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Mispronounced Words
RandomLanguage is a beautiful, but complicated thing. A word can start out one way in one place, but by the time it gets spread across the world, it's become an entirely different thing. In other words, you may be mispronouncing tons of words without even...
