Names which you mispronounced for years, before eventually realising...

... your now incredibly foolish mistake.

I'm almost afraid to admit this, but until last night, I always pronounced Goethe as 'go-uff', when it's actually 'gert-uh'.

I feel so ashamed.

Go.

EDIT: It was during All Quiet on The Western Front, where the tutor says to the class, 'he wants to be all like Goethe and Schiller'. Thank you, for pointing out my ignorance.

My name everyone seemed to get wrong. It's Es-meeee, not Esmay. Got a little confused over 'niamh' too, that one's interesting.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't 'Es-may' the pronunciation of the traditional female variant of the name Esme? Years of French has taught me to always pronounce and spell it as Esmée

My actual name is 'Esme' without an accent, so for me it's just pronounced phonetically. There is the accented version as well, but it's not my name, although there are variations. Also, 'Esmé' is actually a more common boys name than girls name. There's also 'Esmee', 'Esmée' and 'Ezmi', all of which have different pronunciations. I like having a fairly unusual name though- it's nice.

Oh, me too - barely anyone has my name Esmé is the boy's name but Esmée (with an extra e) is the girl's, and I was just curious if people assumed it was pronounced like Esmée is.

The majority of people do assume so, but by now, I think people have got the hang of saying it right- at school at least! It often gets shortened to 'Es' or 'Ez' anyway, so it's not a problem really. What's your name?

Esme's a lovely name, either pronunciation And I get the same name shortenings, too! My name's Esther. You'd think that'd be relatively easy to pronounce...

That's a lovely name too, isn't it pronounced 'Es-ter'?

Nope the 'orn' bit is just someone's accent changing it a bit. The correct pronunciation is shiv-AWN, emphasis on second part.

Surely that would just depend on what the person's accent is? When I say it, "orn" and "awn" sound the same.

'awn' sounds pretty similar in most accents (and is the way that Siobhan is pronounced), whereas in many accents (including Irish, where Siobhan originates) 'orn' would sound completely different.