How do you pronounce jojoba oil

Apparently the plant is from the desert southwest, so jojoba is presumably a Spanish word and j is pronounced like h in Spanish. It's like jalapeno or javelina. You wouldn't expect it to be a y sound like Jagermeister because it's not a German word like Jagermeister is. But when words from another language get adopted into English anything can happen. We don't pronounce Mexico or Los Angeles or patio the way Spanish speakers do. There's no way you can tell by looking at a word how much its common pronunciation by English speakers has drifted from the pronunciation in the original language.

There used to be a ton of shampoos with that ingredient in it and the television commercials all said something like ho-ho-bah , so that is how I say it.

I read somewhere that you shouldn't be embarrassed by mispronouncing things you've only read, because it shows that you're reading expansively. Btw, you aren't an idiot. I remember an ad on TV that specifically addressed this - a musical number that ended with someome saying "What is this Jo-jo-ba" and someone else songsplaining to them that it's "hohoba" and them saying "well why don't they spell it that way". I can only find this ad in a weird French version from Quebec.

My recollection is the English version was pretty much the same. Learn 'sidereal' now, before you realise you've only ever read it in books and then say it out loud in front of a group of people. Ask me how I know. There's an XKCD comic about taking a positive and non-shamey attitude toward people who happen to not know a fact yet. Maybe it will make you feel better about not encountering the pronunciation of the word until now?

Having a word in your reading but not your speaking vocabulary is no shame. I would guess that your doctor was just stating what he believed to be the case, and the embarrassment came from you.

Speaking of sidereal, I literally learned that pronunciation from an audiobook last week. Audiobooks FTW! I'm just so glad I've never said "javelina" out loud. I'm pretty sure. I hope not. Don't be embarrassed. But her explanation was "That's a reading word, not a speaking word. I've kept that phrase with me throughout my life, and it comes in handy.

Rhetoric and rhetorical were what tripped me up. Best answer: I am a person who worries a lot about mispronouncing words. I know I should do something about that anxiety, but instead I just learn how to pronounce words correctly. My life has greatly improved since finding howjsay.

I read somewhere that of all the word pronunciation websites, it is the best because the speakers are professional linguists and the pronunciations are always rigorously correct. Also, if there are alternate national variants of words British vs American, for example they will let you know that.

Also, if you by chance stumble on a word that they haven't articulated yet, it goes into a file. Enough instances of that, and it goes to the top of their list for the words they are continuously adding. Warning-- don't show it to middle school kids or adults with similar sensibilities, because it does have all the cuss words faithfully pronounced by plummy British gentlemen. I'm a former junior high school teacher-- ask me how I know this.

And yes, I know it is and I should be more kind and accepting in how I judge people, but in this case, the person I am judging is myself, and I choose the solution of just fixing the problem.

Really, it's one easy, free, add-supported website howjsay. I recommend it every time the subject of pronunciation fear come up. And of course, just to keep it relevant to the question, here is the entry for jojoba. If it makes you feel better, I was using the word "epitome" in conversation for a while before I learned how to pronounce it. At least I didn't do it in front of students like Professor Mosby over here. Response by poster: Thank you guys so much for all your answers! Thanks again! Well I just learned jojoba, javelina, vitiligo, and sidereal, and I am not an idiot.

I've been noticing recently that there are A LOT of words I have never heard spoken, only read, and since I'm not sure of the pronunciation I'm afraid to use them in conversation.

I don't run across many words I don't know except for Edmund Crispin's books for some reason. So I'm starting a vocab list of the words I have to look up, I guess I will be adding words I don't know how to pronounce also. That only works if you know you don't know how to pronounce it though--i didn't know I was pronouncing jojoba wrong in my head so I would have been right there with you. I will be keeping a special eye out for 'j' words! And we should all be glad that we did not learn the correct pronunciation of La Jolla, California, the way my sister did: by loudly welcoming a group of high school students from that fair city to the American Embassy in Paris.

See here for some MetaTalk fun about this problem. English orthography is the pits. I would have said JoJoba like JoeJonas—lol! You know how I know?

Oh god! Their teacher corrected me. That was fun. I feel like it requires a fair amount of background knowledge to make an educated guess about the pronunciation of a term like jojoba oil, i. So don't feel dumb! That's a lot of context! I'd managed to osmose somehow--quite possibly via ad copy--that jojoba is a plant from the desert southwest, so being from southern California, I assumed the word was derived from Spanish and went with the Spanish pronunciation.

And hey, even if you know all that, you still might be wrong, especially if you don't speak Spanish: after all, it's not always obvious which words maintain their Spanish pronunciation and which don't. Like most people say Los Angeles with the same j as in angel, but the above-mentioned La Jolla is pronounced la hoya by everybody in the area.

I just looked up dour and it gave two pronunciations but the second one matched sour. Dour sour flower. My mother has a story about this word she'd learned from a book that she pronounced as myzled. And I'm fascinated that apple wanted to autocorrect myzled as misled.

It is indeed pronounced ho-ho-ba. As for the "embarrassed for you" bit - that's the part of this story I'm looking at more.

On the one hand, "jojoba" isn't an uncommon word - in certain circles. So in those circles, it would have come up often enough for someone who didn't know the word to have heard people referring to it often enough to get that "okay, maybe this is how to spell that word everyone's been saying. Jojoba oil is used for skin often enough that it would come up a lot there - but you personally are not a dermatologist and likely are not a cosmetologist. So it makes sense for you not to have encountered that word before.

And so what I'm seeing is someone who was a little judgey at you for not having encountered a word before, and that doesn't speak well of your dermatologist, frankly. As to how to handle this - you can do what I did when I made a similar mistake in a record shop when I saw a specific CD behind the counter and asked the clerk to hand me "that Bruce Cock-burn CD behind you".

He just smirked at me a little bit and said "it's pronounced Co- burn, actually," when he handed it to me. And yeah, I was embarrassed - for like three minutes, and then decided "well, fuck him, I didn't know" as I was walking home. For the larger perspective: mis-pronunciation-shaming for that's what it is, no matter whether someone laughs out loud or, like in your case, acts embarrassed on your behalf is likely most of all caused by an individual's residues of unresolved childhood humiliations.

It's not about the word. It's not about you. It's about the person who is laughing or blushing or scoffing, who likely is triggered into re-feeling their older sibling's mirth when they read the word "orange" off the page for the first time or something of the kind.

Depending on their disposition, they either pay back to you , or are mortified some more using you to siphon off their mortification. Don't even begin to play that game for them. My typical reaction for when I've had my coffee and am rested would be "ahwell, happens to the best of us" and move on.

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Can you pronounce this word better or pronounce in different accent or variation? Contribute mode x x x. Learn jojoba oil pronunciation with video. Phonetic spelling of jojoba oil jojoba oil. Add phonetic spelling Cancel. You are not logged in.. Meanings for jojoba oil It is a kind of organic oil that is used for the treatment and healing of conditions like psoriasis, eczema, acne, etc.

Caden Armstrong. Add a meaning Cancel. Wiki content for jojoba oil Jojoba oil. Althea Berge. Aurore Dibbert. Add a sentence Cancel. Shoko Miyaguchi. Hyun Kwak. Italian : olio di jojoba. Adele Cattaneo.

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