Pronunciation

Just try to pronounce this hardest-to-pronounce Illinois place and you'll wish there were some additional vowels in its 5-letter name.

Congratulations, Missouri. You now have the hardest to pronounce city in America.

My career has involved speaking for more than 40 years so you'd think I'd be good at saying things by now. Not so much and that's especially true of the Illinois town that was just declared one of the hardest to pronounce in the United States.

I've read the sign of this tiny Missouri place and have still not correctly said it right apparently. That's one reason why it's now considered one of the hardest towns to pronounce in the United States of America.

There are rebels in our midst that are saying what should be an obvious word incorrectly. It's such a problem that the speech experts have issued a warning to everyone that has managed to say "Illinois" incorrectly.

Even though I have been a professional broadcaster for more than 40 years, I am amazingly not a linguistic expert especially when it comes to confusing town names in Missouri. Things are sometimes said differently here and there are some Missouri places that almost everyone says wrong.