In My Language That Sounds Like / Real Life

Real-life incidents of In My Language, That Sounds Like....

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Other Examples

• Arabic has many words (unfortunately some quite high frequency) which sound suspect to English speakers. Most notably the word for "only" sounds similar to "fuck it."
  • The Arab name Samar is pronounced like "summer" but means "blackness of the night".
• In Romanian, a lot of English words have been largely incorporated into the language informally (meaning that absolutely everybody knows what they mean), such as "movie" and "ball". Thus, when trying to pronounce "football" correctly in Romanian, the result is homophonous with the term "fut ball", which roughly means "fucking a ball".
  • Special congratulations go to EA Sports and FIFA, for abbreviating FIFA Ultimate Team to "FUT", which is written exactly like the Romanian word for "I fuck".
• A lot of names are problematic in different languages. Marika for example corresponds to "marica" ('fag') in Spanish, while the Japanese name Junko might look really bad on paper to any English speaker without knowledge of Japanese.
• This sometimes ends up in a pun when someone can't use the ~ symbol in "año" (year) and asks "Cuantos anos tienes?" (Literally, "How many anuses do you have?"). Something hilariously similar happens in Italian, if you can't pronounce double letters: "anno" (year) becomes "ano" — so asking "Quanti ani hai?" is, once again, asking how many anuses you possess.
  • In Latin, which Spanish, Portuguese and Italian are derived from, annus is "year," while anus means exactly what you would think it means. Both are declined identically, and the only difference in pronunciation is the length for which the "n" sound is held.
  • In Czech, ano (shortened to no, unlike in English pronounced with a monophtong) means "yes". In Polish, ano tak and no tak are also colloquial forms of "yes" (regular word is simply tak). And no, especially in internet communicators, may be interpreted as colloquial "yes" or English "no".
    • "No" in Czech, actually, can mean both "yes" and "well...", depending on context. Which of course means it's a very frequently used word.
    • And "no tak" in Czech means something more along the lines of "come on".
  • In Japanese, "ano" means "that" or "um".
  • In Filipino, "ano" is the equivalent of "what".
• Old joke: In Estonian, the phrase for "twelve months" is "kaksteist kuud." When pronounced correctly, it sounds like the English phrase "cocks taste good."
• In Dutch, the word for Cook is spelled Kok. For added interest, Kok or de Kok (the cook) are perfectly common Dutch last names. The Prime Minister through most of The '90s was Wim Kok.
  • And in the other direction, the Dutch "kut" sounds like English "cut" but means "cunt".
  • Flickr, the website, sounds like "flikker" to a Dutchman, which is the local equivalent for "faggot".
  • A sign for a "Kiek in de Kok" museum (despite its Low German name, the most famous one is in Estonia) has become somewhat well-known thanks to this trope, sometimes in pictures where tourists act out what it sounds like. (It actually means "peep into the kitchen" and refers to a type of guard tower, on the idea of the guards being able to look straight into people's houses.)
• In Afrikaans, the word for "look" is "kyk" (pronounced like "kike"), and the word for "child" is "kind" (pronounced similar to "cunt").
• The national currency of Vietnam is the đồng. An endless source of amusement for American soldiers during The Vietnam War.
• Similarly, the national currency of Botswana is the pula, which means "rain" in Tshwana but happens to mean "red" in Filipino, and "cock" in Romanian.
• The taxonomic term (via Latin) for seals is "phocids". It's pronounced "fo-sids", but can sound obscene if mispronounced even in English.
  • Despite what you might think, the original Latin for seal ("phoca") doesn't have any unfortunate soundalikes. In classical Latin "ph" is simply a strong "p," and in medieval Latin the "c" sound is soft. So you have either "Poh-ka" (classical) or "Foh-sa" (medieval), but not "foh-ka."
• Averted when Ford Motor Company released its Kuga compact crossover. In Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin languages) and Slovenian, Kuga means plague. The company disregarded the awkward translation and released the model on the aforementioned markets with no name change.
• In Japanese, "tako", pronounced the same as "taco", is the word for octopus.
  • In Swahili, "tako" means "buttock."
  • In French, "un tacot" is slang for The Alleged Car.
  • In Serbian, "tako" equals English "so (+ adjective)" or describes how is something done.
  • In Georgian, "Tako" is a girl's nickname (a diminutive of Tamar).
• According to Serbian slang, Coca Cola is pronounced the same way as "(he) is killing the car"
  • Only if you deliberately mispronounce it. Serbian uses pitch accent so although both are spelled as "koka kola", they are not pronounced the same.
• In Te Reo Māori, the language of New Zealand's indigenous peoples, the particle "whaka-" is used to indicate causation. It sounds identical to the English "fucker". Cue tourists snickering at place names such as Whakatane and Whakapapa.
  • Doubly hilarious when you understand that "tane" (tah-ne) means "man" or "husband". Whakatane indeed.
• Faggot:
  • The word "fagot" also exists in archaic English and French in reference to a bundle (usually sticks or something similar).
  • "Fag" is British slang for a cigarette.
  • "Faggot" is also a (now obscure) British foodstuff, oddly akin to Swedish meatballs.
  • Fagot is also the NATO reporting name for the MiG-15.
• "Numnah" is a Hindi word.
• Martin Luther had the misfortune of being tried at the Diet of Worms. (Pronounced "Dee-et of Vorms," but how often are you going to hear it out loud?) Similar problems befall the existence of the Japanese Imperial Diet, Japan having copied much of its modernization policies from German states.
  • Parodied in The Fifth Elephant — the treaty setting out Uberwaldian life was signed at the Diet of Bugs. Sam Vimes lampshades it.
    • And in an episode of Blackadder, with "the collapse of the Treaty of Insects."
• (All transliterated:) The Hebrew word "Oti" means "me". The Hebrew word "mi" means "who?". The Hebrew word "hu" (pronounced "who") means "he". And the Hebrew word "he" means "she".
  • All of this makes a lot more sense if you're aware of their Arabic cognates, which sound less like the English words: Hebrew "mi"=Arabic "men"; "hu"="huwa"; and "he"="hiya."
• An inter-English example: the word "snigger" is unremarkable in Britain but will likely elicit controversy in the US due to sounding similar to a certain racial slur (hence the word becoming "snicker" on that side of the pond).
• There is an Austrian village by the name of Fucking, whose residents used to spend surprisingly large amounts of money on replacing stolen road signs until they ended up putting a sign made of concrete. They changed the name to "Fugging" in 2021 to try and stop people from showing up to laugh at the name. It didn't work; the sign got vandalized shortly after.
  • A beer named "Fucking Hell" has appeared, its name referring to this place and its color, "hell" meaning "light" or "pale".
  • Austria also has a town called "Windpassing".
• Latin is a serial offender, as most words for genitalia are euphemisms, with the original meaning being lost when other languages just adopted them as the standard terms for genitalia.
  • "Labia" means "lips". In English, "labia" only refers to the "lips" of lady parts. The original Latin word and its meaning are preserved in Spanish "labios" and Portuguese "lábios". The English word for lip is from the same Proto-Indo-European root, just through Proto-Germanic.
  • Along with "labia" (lips) there are "penis" (tail), "vagina" (scabbard), "anus" (ring/circle), etc.
  • In German, "Scheide" can mean both "scabbard" and "vagina".
  • One particular Latin textbook had a recurring character known as "Sextus". He is very annoying. The Latin word for "annoying" is "molestus". So you have, repeated over and over throughout the book, "Sextus molestus", or, "Sextus is Annoying". There's a good chance that this was deliberate on the part of the publishers. Given the maturity level of the average high school freshmen, this causes problems.
  • The Greek word for "foreigner," barbaros, was borrowed into Latin as barbarus, where it sounds like it comes from the root barba ("beard"). This led to a spurious but sadly still popular belief that "barbarian" originally meant someone with a beard.
• The word "douche," while literally meaning "wash," is only used to refer to a vaginal wash in American English. Consequently, it's also borderline obscene slang for a very unpleasant person. In about a dozen other languages and the UK, it still has its original meaning of "shower". (Words that sound like "shower", meanwhile, tend to mean "rainfall" in some Germanic languages.)
• There is a Vietnamese soup called "Pho" (diacritical marks omitted), but the phonetic pronunciation is "Fa". ^note In English, anyway. The closest approximation of the Vietnamese pronunciation would be fuh. Many Vietnamese restauranteurs have amused themselves by naming their shops things that are perfectly fine if you pronounce it like an ignorant American. "Pho King" and variants are quite popular.
• Traffic signs reading "Infart" are quite common in Sweden.
• In Denmark, a timetable will likely be labelled "fartplan".
• A popular Iranian cleaning product is called "Barf", the Persian word for snow.
• Two of Jesus' disciples shared the name Judas: Judas Iscariot and Judas Thaddeus. In English, the guy that didn't betray Jesus is called Jude, while the other one is called Judas. Spanish makes no such distinction, with both being called Judas (Tadeo and Iscariote). Cue fundamentalists pointing out Latin-American parishes named San Judas as proof that Catholics are evil.
• Condoleezza Rice's first name causes endless mirth among Czechs, "kunda" being a dirty word for female privates and "lízat" meaning "to lick". Newscasters refer to her simply as "Riceová" or "the [former] American secretary of state".
• The webpage of a Canadian sociology professor, Ziva Kunda, has become legendary among Czech and Slovak internet users. "Kunda" is a variant of Country Matters and "živá" means "living" — incidentally, Ziva Kunda herself died in 2004. Ms. Kunda was apparently aware of the source of her popularity in that part of the world and did not find it funny.
• Obviously, the Estonian town of Kunda is also very popular with Czechs.
• One book by Fritz Spiegl relates the story of how, in the Second World War, the obvious thing to do with the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories was to abbreviate it to AMGOT. Unfortunately this turned out to mean something unprintable in Turkish and the abbreviation was hastily changed to "AMG". In a footnote, Spiegl adds that none of the Turks he knew was prepared to tell him what the meaning was. One, after he had finished laughing, said "no such word", which is strictly accurate — it's two rude words^note "cunt" (am) and "ass" (göt) joined together.
• The Dutch word for "removable" is "demontabel."
• To Americans, "bimbo" (pronounced /bɪm.boʊ/) is a derogatory thing to call a woman. To Mexicans, who pronounce it as /bim.bo/, it's the name of their country's largest food corporation and a colloquial term for for "bread", much like Kleenex is for tissues.
  • That brand of bread is available in the US; the label includes 'Say BEEM-bo' on it under the name.
  • In German, "Bimbo" can be a derogatory term for an African, or a servant or general dogsbody.
  • Any wonder why the Bimbo company, also a major bakery in the U.S., mainly make Arnold or Oroweat bread?
  • The fun part? "Bimbo" comes from the Italian word for "kid".
• Arabic-language news media (e.g. Al Jazeera) were put in a bind when Jean-Marc Ayrault was appointed Prime Minister of France—you see, "Ayrault" pronounced in the French fashion (i.e. "air-oh") is one small sound away from sounding like `ayruh, which is Levantine^note Lebanese/Syrian/Palestinian/Jordanian Arabic for "his dick/cock/[insert vulgar word for male genitalia here]". They elected to pronounce the "lt" to avoid the problem...earning the ire of certain Arab intellectuals, many of whom are fans of the French.
  • In the opposite direction (more or less), a fairly classical way of insulting someone in Arabic is to call them "nājis'', i.e. ritually impure. In colloquial use, where it is usually pronounced nijis, it's come to mean either someone who's just generally dirty or those whose habits you find unpleasant (it's often used to not-so-subtly imply that the target frequents whorehouses). In most dialects, this doesn't cause any funny business, but in Egypt, where the "j" is pronounced as a "g", it comes out as "nigis", which English-speakers might hear as...well...let's just say black Americans visiting Egypt have gotten suitably offended, but not in the way the Egyptian meant it to.
  • Najis also happens to mean "excrement" in Malay (no doubt the word was mis-appropriated when Malacca was trading with the Arabs in the 14th century and absorbed some of the words). This is why many of the corrupt prime minister Najib Razak's detractors and critics are calling him this.
• The title of the First Minister of Wales in Welsh is "Prif Weinidog Cymru." That's right. "Minister" in Welsh sounds exactly like "whiny dog."
• Lakota examples:
  • The names Che and Sean sound like [cɛ] and [ʃã], meaning "penis" and "vagina". The words aren't considered "dirty", but still...
  • The name Che is exactly the same as a Latin American Spanish (most particularly from Argentina) slang that is used as a greeting.
  • Not really dirty, but cola sounds like [kʰola], "friend". This also applies to coda, due to the inherent Spell My Name With An S of Sioux languages.
  • Really complicated one: Kanji sounds like [kãgi], "crow". Not much, until you remember what crow is synonymous with in Kansai-ben.
  • Conversely, pi means "liver".
• Linguists use the following pseudo-French nursery rhyme to indicate the difficulty of parsing language when unsure which language is being spoken:
  Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
  Homme petit d'homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles
  Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s'y mènent
  Coup d'un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine
• Inverted by English and Afrikaans with the sentences My pen is in my hand and My hand is in warm water, which are both written the same way and mean the same thing, but sound rather different. (And for a bonus, both languages know about The Problem with Pen Island.)
• "Knikker" is the Dutch word for "marble", the children's toy not the stone, but resembles British English knicker.
• In American Sign Language, the sign for "vagina" is made by holding your hands flat, fingers together, thumbs extended, and the tips of the thumbs and forefingers touching. Now think of how many times you've seen a hearing person making that sign or a close variation of it when they don't know what else to do with their hands. Notable example: Michelle Obama on the cover of the Dec 2011/Jan 2012 Reader's Digest.
• The word written sein means "to be" in German and "breast" in French.
  • And it sounds somewhat like the Hebrew word zayin^note זַיִן, which can mean "the seventh letter of the Hebrew alphabet", "arms" (as in weapons), or "cock".
  • One wonders if this is what draws some Israeli or Jewish fans to One Direction.^note Zayn Malik, get it?
• The fairly rare Israeli last name ‘Pines’ (pronounced ‘pea-ness’). Notable cases include:
  • Israeli artist Ya‘akov Pines^note Yes, the article says ‘Pins’, but Hebrew never has word-final consonant clusters, unless it’s a morphemic /-t/. It’s complicated.. He mentioned how a reporter once asked him very politely whether he should change his name. ‘I gave him, that gentile, a proper answer: that "Ya‘akov" was a fine Hebrew name!’
  • Ofir Pines-Paz, Israeli politician, who was made Minister of Interior.
  • Guy Pines, host of a popular entertainment news show, who often interviews Hollywood celebrities. He often checks into hotels saying his names is ‘Pines’ (pronouncing it as the plural of ‘pine’ tree), and when he told Julia Roberts his name was Guy Pines, she said hers was ‘Woman Vagina’.
• Continuing with Hebrew, "Thank you very much" is translated as "Toda Raba". For Japanese speakers, the whole expression would sound funny, since "Toda" is also a valid Japanese surname, making some names, such as Japanese voice actress Keiko Toda, sound funny for Hebrew speakers, especially when spelled using the Asian order, since it would sound like saying "Thank you, Keiko" in Hebrew, and "Keiko, thank you" when using her name in the western order.
• The high-IQ group Mensa chose its name because it means "table" in Latin, symbolizing the coming together of equals, but didn't foresee a Mexican chapter of Mensa... and mensa means "^note femalemoron" in Mexican Spanish. "¿Eres mensa?" means "Are you dumb?".

  • It probably is not coincidental that "Mensa" also contains the Latin word mens = "mind".

  • While not in dictionaries, Mensa can be interpreted as the verb menstruate in Swedish^note the accepted term is "ha mens", literally "to have menstruation", but since many verbs follow a (noun)-a structure, Swedes can easily make verbs out of nouns for comedy; the contextual overlap is nonexistent but will produce a snicker or two should the club be brought up in an elementary school.
  • In German-speaking universities, a Mensa (plural: Mensen) is a students' canteen, also from the Latin for "table", since Latin used to be the language of academics.
  • It's a students' canteen in Italian schools as well.
• Czech/Slovak/Polish/German fakt and Russian факт (meaning fact) is pronounced [fäkt] with open central vowel, like fucked in Australian English. The Czech word is often used to ask "is that a fact?" or "really?". Many a foreigner felt offended. In Czech and Polish the answer "Fakt." means something like "It's true."
  • Tables for "ash" and "honey" here suggest that fact /fækt/ in some English dialects may be pronounced like fucked /fʌkt/ in others — Separated by a Common Language?
• In Finland, the word "home" means "mold" (as in fungus). Home videos with English texts used to cause much hilarity to kids back in the video era.
• In Mexico, the name of the famous airplane manufacturer Boeing sounds the same as a famous brand of juice sold there named Boing. This becomes, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as a source of jokes between Mexicans:
  Kid 1: What do the Twin Towers have in common with two sandwiches?
  Kid 2: Dunno
  Kid 1:: That's easy: You can screw them with a Bo(e)ing'!
• In the English- and Greek-speaking worlds, the name Kiki is an ordinarily fine name stemming from the Greek saint Kyriaki. Should this person travel to the Philippines, however, they may find introducing themselves to people a hassle, as their name means "pussy" in Tagalog. In Spain, meanwhile, a "kiki" is a "quickie".
  • Meanwhile in French, "kiki" is a childish word for "penis." And oddly enough, a common name for small dogs.
  • The Thai name Pukitta is sometimes shortened to "Puki", another Filipino synonym for "kiki". Actually, "Puki" means "vagina" for most of South-East Asia (Thailand appears to be an exception), this is why the name of Garfield's teddy bear is rarely mentioned in the region, and when it does come up conversations become very awkward. Also why you get dirty stares if you call your significant other by that term.
• If you say "pet" to a speaker of Catalan or Valencian he is going to understand "flatulence" not "companion animal", but conversely if you say "fart" he is going to understand "having had enough of something" not "flatulence".
  • The "pet" thing also happens in French and partially in Italian (where "flatulence" is actually "peto", but still close enough to sound funny).
• In English, the word "moot" can mean a number of things; a point up for debate, a suggestion, and so on. Albanian speakers would hear this as mut — their equivalent of "shit".
  • Similarly, a speaker of Albanian hearing an automobile owner referring to their mode of transportation as a car might snicker, as the word is a homophone for kar — or "dick".
    • And if you really wanted to stretch it, a karat — the unit to describe gold purity, is the definite plural of the same thing, albeit with a different pronunciation (Albanians stress the a as in "father").
• In Tiberias, Israel, there's a inn named Maman Mansion. Maman is the Japanese slang equivalent of the phrase MILF.
• "Deception" means, or sounds similar to the word meaning, disappointment in several Romance languages.
  • It's also the case with the word "Ingenuity", that is similar to the word meaning "naivete".
• In Icelandic, the word for slush is "krap" and the word for professionals is "fagmenn".
• Learning about the Mongol invasions of Vietnam will invariably cause giggling fits amongst Vietnamese students. "Mongol-Yuan" is written as "Nguyên Mông" in Vietnamese, and the two words are homophones with "intact, whole" and "bottom". And given the fact that Vietnamese forces roundly kicked Mongolian butts (three times, totaling 9 months in the space of 30 years), let's just say that, uh, the Mongols did not leave Vietnam with their bottoms intact.
• Czech car company name, Škoda (in Czech Š denotes sound like English sh or Polish sz), sounds like Polish "szkoda" (damage, or it's a pity, or as in waste of time/money/effort).
  • In fact, the Czech meaning is pretty much the same. The name comes from the last name of the founder of this company.
• The name of the car Proton Jebat has been a source of many laughs in the Czech Republic since it's been revealed. Jebat in Czech means to fuck.
• There is a lightbulb company named "Osram" (a portmanteau of "Osmium" and "Wolfram" (tungsten)). In Polish, this literally means "I'll shit (on something)".
  • There is a similar joke in Slovak as well.
• This trope occasionally also extends to mere abbreviations:
  • In the UK and much of the rest of the world, "RAF" stands for the Royal Air Force, who valiantly fought and gloriously beat back the Nazis in WW2. In Germany, however, it instead stands for the Red Army Faction, a 1970s pseudo-Communist terrorist group responsible for dozens of bombings and assassinations and decades-long nationwide manhunts and paranoia. So naturally, their connotations of "RAF" are much worse than in the UK. To avoid confusion, the British RAF and the German RAF are almost always referred to unabbreviated in Germany and the rest of the world respectively.
  • RAF is also British slang for an ugly woman — Rough As Fuck.
  • To Americans, "IRA" is a pension plan involving salary deductions — Individual Retirement Account. To the British it's an especially nasty Irish terrorist group (Irish Republican Army). When McDonald's tried to cut costs in its British operation by using payroll stationery imported from its American operation, employee deductions for pensions were listed on payslips under the heading IRA. Given that NORAID was routinely accused of funding the Irish Republican Army, the story went around that McDonald's were making compulsory deductions from British employees to fund Irish terrorism. And pronounced like a word, "ira" is "ire in Latin and several Romance languages (this even led the Brazilian band Ira! to spell their name with an exclamation point to make clear it's a word rather than an acronym).
• Due to Hebrew orthographic limitations, the first name Finn is written in Hebrew the same way as the Hebrew word for "penis", pin (פין). This makes watching Finn Hudson, Finn the Human, Finn Polmar, and others on their respective shows in Israel (where dubbing is used exclusively for children-oriented material and subbing is used otherwise) very awkward.
• Rav or raban is Hebrew for "rabbi" (which originally meant "my rav"). Hebrew omits the copula in the present tense under certain circumstances. And now, every time you hear the name "Paco Rabanne", you’ll get the image of a Mexican rabbi.
• When James May of Top Gear warned his fellow presenters that "car" and "peach" were rude words in Albanian, they blew him off. It turns out he was right: "kar" (pronounced like "car") means "penis", while "piçkë" (pronounced roughly like "peach") means "vagina".
• There's a river in western Latvia called Pērse, which means "ass" in Estonian.
• Irishwomen named Órfhlaith (pronounced ORE-lah, lit. "gold princess") are in for an unpleasant surprise if they ever visit Israel; ‘orlá^Hebrewערלה means "foreskin" in Hebrew.
• The British actor Tony Osoba's surname means "person" in Czech.
• "Wahine", the Polynesian word for "woman", sounds like the Latin pronunciation of "vagina".
• The English raccoon and the Greek procyon look similar and both refer to the same animal, but have completely different origins. The former is derived from the Algonquin arakun ("scratcher"), while the former is from Ancient Greek pro kuon ("before the dog").
• Porn ("blessing") is a common Thai name. Variations include Somporn ("worthy blessing") and Porntip ("divine blessing"). Then there's the cities of Bangkok and Phuket.
• The Scandinavian name Astrid, "divine beauty", looks and sounds like but is unrelated to the Greek word for "star child".
• The mare of Germanic folklore is not a female horse, but a demon that brings bad dreams, hence the cognate nightmare. The Filipino analogue is the batibat, which is not to be confused with Count von Count's happy dance.
• Zalzalah Koh, a newly discovered island in Pakistan, means "Earthquake Island", for it was formed during a strong earthquake in Pakistan in 2013. But in the Philippines, it sounds like "I'm a wanker". Just look at this weather reporter failing to retain his serious composure.
• The pioneer of Thai cuisine in the Philippines was a restaurant named Sukothai. However, its low success in its early years was partly blamed because its name sounded like "Suka Tae" — which is Filipino for "Vomit Poo".
• Some Malay to English examples:
  • The Malay word for money is both "Wang" and "Duit" (pronounced "Do it"). Yes, there are teen jokes about prostitution centered around the words.
  • When someone's telling you "sakit" (pronounced "suck it"), they are in pain and asking for help, and are not rudely telling you off.
  • Then there is "tolong", which is sometimes misheard as "too long". Again, they are crying for help and not complaining about something taking too long to complete.
  • On the tamer side, the Malay word for water is... air.
• In Dutch, "death" is "dood". An English-speaker with no knowledge of Dutch will assume it's pronounced like "dude".
• There's a Mexican movie director named Hari Sama, whose name is pretty funny in Japanese, since it could be translated as "Lord Needle" (針様)
  • In Malay, that usually means "same day" (as in, same day delivery).
• In Latin, gallus (pl. galli) means "rooster." It's also identical to how the Romans wrote and pronounced the name of the Gauls, who inhabited what's now France. This may be where the idea of the Gallic rooster comes from.
• The East African name Nasteho means "advice and mercy", but looks/sounds like "nasty ho".
• In Jamaican patois, "deejays" are dancehall/reggae musicians who toast or rap to instrumental music tracks(riddims), while actual disc jockeys are known as "selectors".
• Heinz sells a mayonnaise-ketchup combination condiment called Mayochup. When they began selling it in Canada, they found out that Mayochup sounds like the word for "shitface" in the Cree indigenous language.
• The Icelandic word grey means "pitiful person, wretch". It becomes funnier when referring to CGP Grey, especially after he posted this video about how frustrating his research can be.
• There's a village in Northern Ireland called Ahoghill. It's pronounced closer to "a-hock-ull" than "a-hog-hill", but many people — including other Northern-Irish people — snicker when they see its name.
• Non-Americans, especially non-English speakers, often assume the city of Waco (actually pronounced "way-co") is pronounced "wacko", and accidentally turn its name into an American slang word meaning "crazy person". On the other hand, its proper pronunciation sounds like "hueco", the Spanish word for "hole".
• The Sultanate of Rum was a kingdom in what's now Turkey. Despite what it sounds like in English, it wasn't actually famous for producing alcohol. Its name was derived from Rome, because its rulers conquered lands previously ruled by the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire.
• The second-to-last king of Luang Prabang (now part of Laos) was named Zakarine, also transliterated Sakharine. To English-speakers his name sounds like "saccharine".
• The Georgian word for both "I" and "me" is... "me" (მე, pronounced "meh").
• The Latin for "old woman, crone" is "anus". The Latin for "six old women" is "sex anūs". The Latin for "six old women bring forth" is "sex anūs indūcunt"
• The Romanian word for "beech" (the tree) is... fag.
• In Burmese, the given name "Lisa" (popular in many Western European languages) has the unfortunate meaning of "eat dick," given that li means "dick," sa means "eat," and the language's word order is subject-object-verb (thus rendering the unfortunate translation a grammatically-correct statement).
• "Bagrat" is a Georgian and Armenian name (ბაგრატ in Georgian, Բագրատ in Armenian). It looks odd to English-speakers, though it's pronounced more like "ba-grat" than "bag rat".
• The ancient name of the Persians, Parsa, became mutated to Persai in Greek. This led the Greeks to create a myth making the Persians descended from the hero Perseus. Persai is also a declension of the ancient Greek word for "destroy" or "sack [a city]," which would make sense to the Greeks given how the two peoples were getting along back then.
• There's a place in Vietnam called Thốt Nốt. It's part of a city called Cần Thơ. Tumblr users had a field day when someone posted its Wikipedia page.
• Turkey has a province and a city both called Batman.
• Hmong, the name of the ethnic minority known as Miao in Mandarin, as mentioned on the Chinese page, sounds like "mong", an English ableist slur equivalent to "retard", being short for "mongoloid", an obsolete term for a person with Down syndrome.
• The Armenian word for "I" and "me" is Ես, transliterated "yes".
• The Thai words for pumpkin are "fuk thong".
• "plane" in Latin means "plainly; clearly". It's pronounced with two syllables, unlike the English word for a flying machine.
• Dixit (pronounced “dhik shith”) is a somewhat common North Indian surname. When the Chief Minister of Delhi, Shiela Dixit visited New Zealand on a diplomatic trip to increase investment in her state, a local comic had a field day laughing that her last name sounded like “dick shit”. Unfortunately for him, no one in his audience laughed.
• Pali is an Indo-Aryan language. It's also, unfortunately, an ethnic slur for Palestinians.
• This is more of a “In My Language That Looks Like”, but some Greek letters are confusing to Latin alphabet users who don’t know the Greek one. Uppercase I in Greek resembles a H in the Latin alphabet, Lowercase N looks like a v, and lowercase g looks like an uppercase Y. And the letter Chi, which to Latin alphabet users looks like an X, is pronounced like “ch” and not “ks”.
• Ditto with the Armenian alphabet, which is derived from the Greek one. Ա looks like a cross between Q and U but is actually uppercase A; lowercase a is ա, which looks like an upside-down m. Բ is uppercase B, not F. Ե and ե are uppercase and lowercase E (or Ye; the letter can be transliterated both ways). Է and է is also E or Ē (it represents a slightly different vowel sound). Հ is H, not an incomplete R. Մ/մ is M/m, not U/u. ն is lowercase n. շ isn't a number, it's lowercase s (or š). ո is lowercase o. Ս/ս is S/s. Տ is uppercase T. ց represents a sound that doesn't have an equivalent Latin letter (at least not in English), but it's a ts sound instead of a g.
• Similar to the above two, Cherokee syllabary has symbols that resemble Latin ones, but are said differently - Ꮃ is pronounced like "la", Ꭰ is "a", Ꮏ is "hna", Ꮖ is "qua", Ꮮ is "tle", and Ᏸ is "ye". There are some that look similar to other languages’ alphabets too - there’s Ꮊ, which is said like "me", but looks like the Korean symbol for "a". There’s also Ꮑ ("ne") and Ꮎ ("na"), which resemble Greek letters Lambda and Theta respectively.
• The Turkish word for "horizon" is "ufuk".
• Armenian names provide some examples for English-speakers:
  • Hayk (Հայկ) is a common male name. It sounds exactly like the English word "hike" (a long walk, usually in the countryside).
  • Gor (Գոռ) is another common male name. It sounds like the English word "gore" (extreme violence).
  • Mane (Մանե) is a common female name. Unlike the English word "mane", it's pronounced with two syllables.
  • Then there's Poghos (Պողոս), the Armenian version of Paul. It doesn't sound like anything in English (it's pronounced vaguely like "porous" with the stress on the second syllable) but looks downright odd.
  • Karen (Գարեն) is a male name in Armenia.
• "Úžasné!" is the Slovak equivalent of "Wow!" or "Awesome!". "Užasne" in Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian means "terrible". As a Reddit user joked, imagine the confusion if a Slovakian declared Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian food was awesome...
• The Azeri word for "weapon", yaraq, is a loanword from Turkish, where it's spelt yarak. The problem is, the Turkish word's meaning has shifted over the years since the Azeris borrowed it. Now it means "dick".
• "ale" means "alcoholic drink" in English, "but" in Polish, Czech and Slovak, and "sale; discount" in Finnish.
• In several languages (Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, Slovak, Hungarian and Czech), kurva means "whore". It means the same in Polish, where it's spelt kurwa. But in Swedish and Indonesian, kurva means "curve; bend".
• The Arabic word for "above; upstairs" is فوق, transliterated "fūq".
• "dabo" means "bread" in Amharic and "ass" in Somali.
• "siil" sounds like "seal", but it's actually the Somali word for "pussy".
• The Somali word for "me" is... "i" (pronounced "ee"). "i was" means "fuck me".
• The Vietnamese word for "complex; complicated" is "phức tạp". It's pronounced "fook tap"; say that quickly and it sounds like "fucked up".
• "fullur" in Icelandic means "drunk" when used to describe a person.
• "zwanger" is Dutch for "pregnant". The similar-sounding Icelandic word "svangur" means "hungry".
• "kulam" means "witch" in Filipino and "everyone" in Hebrew.
• The Turkish word for "cake" is... pasta.
• In Turkish, "beter" means "worse".
• "meme" (pronounced something like "may-may") is the Turkish word for "breast". In Bikol Central in the Philippines, "mimi" means the same thing.
• In Slovenian, naučik means "tutorial". In Bosnian, naučnik means "scientist".
• In Serbian, словенски (slovenski) means "Slavic". In Slovenian, Slovenski means... "Slovenian".
• "ratować" means "to save; to rescue" in Polish. It shares a root with the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian word "ratovati", which means "to fight; to wage war".
• hay (հայ) is Armenian for "Armenian (person)". It sounds exactly like the English greeting "Hi!".
• Despite what they look and sound like, Tamaz (თამაზ) and Tahmaz (Թահմազ) are not the Georgian and Armenian forms of Thomas.^note The actual Georgian and Armenian equivalents of Thomas are Toma/თომა and Tovmas/Թովմաս respectively. They're both derived from a Persian name, Tahmasp/Tahmasb (تهماسب). Confusion is especially likely because the Hungarian form of Thomas is Tamás.
• Jakob Hermanszoon was a 16th-century Dutch theologian. It was standard practice at the time to Latinise names, so he's gone down in history as Jacobus Arminius. Likewise, the school of thought he founded is known as Arminianism and its followers are called Arminians. None of this has anything to do with the country Armenia. Confusingly, Armenia is also a Latin adaptation (of an Ancient Greek word) making this a case of two words that were unconnected in their native languages but happened to be Latinised almost identically.
• The surname of Romanian singer (of Hungarian ethnicity) Daniela◊ Gyorfi◊ has similar pronunciation with Romanian words for "rag" and "hooker". Add some scandal over her past love affairs and cue twenty years of rough jokes on her sex life.

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