Pronunciation · Famously mispronounced words
How to pronounce “awry”
uh-RY
2 syllables · stress on “RY”
In short
Say “awry” in 3 steps
- 1Split it as a + wry, not aw + ry.
- 2Start with an unstressed schwa: uh.
- 3Finish with the word “wry”, rhyming with “dry”. Stress falls there.
The version to avoid
Commonly said as: AW-ree — treating aw- as in “awful”
The word is a-wry, not aw-ry: the prefix is a- and the root is “wry”. Readers split it at the wrong point and produce a completely different word.
Hear real people say it
Model audio is consistent; real speech is not. Hearing several actual speakers is what makes a word recognisable when someone says it at full speed.
Real speakers
2 human recordingsActual people saying “awry”, not a synthetic voice. Real speech varies — that variation is what you need to recognise, and what a single model voice cannot show you.
Recordings from Wikimedia Commons by EncycloPetey and Commander Keane, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 / CC BY-SA 4.0. Full credits.
Practise it out loud
Reading about a sound does not change your mouth. Say it, hear it back, and fix one thing at a time.
Say it yourself
0/6 practisedListen first, then record. You get feedback on the individual sounds, the stress and the rhythm — no account needed, and nothing is stored.
Recordings are used only to generate this feedback and are not stored. Your accent is never penalised: IELTS scores intelligibility, and so do we.
The sounds inside this word
Each links to a full guide with mouth position, audio and drills. If a word keeps failing, the problem is usually one of these.
More famously mispronounced words
Same pattern, same fix. Learning them as a group is far faster than one at a time.
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Frequently asked questions
How do you pronounce awry?
How many syllables are in awry?
What is the most common mistake with awry?
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