Flautist [FLOU-tist]
What: A person who plays the flute.
How you pronounce it: This is actually a trick shibboleth because the word flautist is indeed real and is pronounced the way you probably assume it is. But while the term is used widely in Britain, in the United States, flutist, pronounced as it is spelled (FLOO-tist), is preferred.
While you might think flutist is simply an American evolution of flautist, it isn’t. It’s actually the older of the two ― emerging in 1603, while flautist didn’t come around until 1860, first appearing in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Magic Faun. It’s possible Hawthorne chose flautist because the book was set in Italy, where flute is flauto and a flutist is a flautista. Flutist, on the other hand, is a direct offspring of the French flûtiste, which came from flûte. So flutist has the historical claim and the more direct genealogy. Even so, many Americans persist in thinking flautist sounds more correct, more sophisticated, and more musical.
YOU ARE READING
Mispronounced Words
RandomLanguage is a beautiful, but complicated thing. A word can start out one way in one place, but by the time it gets spread across the world, it's become an entirely different thing. In other words, you may be mispronouncing tons of words without even...
