"-ough"!
Oh, English. Just when we’re starting to feel good about you, pronunciation strikes again.
WATCH: If You Mispronounce These Words, You're Not Alone
For a long part of its history, English spelling wasn’t consistent. And over the centuries, the pronunciation of vowels and even consonants have dramatically changed. Add to this the fact that English has borrowed words from all over the world. All of this results in a delightful mess of letter combinations that can be pronounced in many different ways—like we see in the cluster of –ough in English.