In today’s episode, Embarrassing English Errors Ep09: Fork & Fuck, you’ll learn the subtle difference between the pronunciation of the words “fork” and “fuck”.

Embarrassing English Errors Ep09: Fork & Fuck

G’day guys and welcome to this episode of Embarrassing English Errors. Today we’re going to go over two words that are quite often confused or mispronounced that can lead to some quite awkward confusion, because one of them is incredibly rude and the other one is incredibly benign. It’s just “fork” and “fuck”, “fork” and “fuck”. So the sounds “or” and “uh”.

So, a “fork” is obviously the three or four-pronged implement that you use when you eat something. So, it’s made of metal. You’ll often be holding it in your left hand with a knife in your right hand. And you eat with the fork. You put food on it and you put the food in your mouth.

“Fuck”, obviously, I don’t think I would have to explain that to many people. It’s a swear word. “To fuck” literally means to have sex, but it’s used in a plethora of different ways. It’s… there’s so many different ways of using this word. It’s rude. You want to be careful when you use it and how you use it, and that’s why it’s so important to try and really nail, really do well at pronouncing these two different sounds properly, because you don’t want to confuse them.

So, I might just add too that my pronunciation is sort of neutral Australian English pronunciation. So, a lot of the words that I might go through today could be pronounced differently, and I’ll talk about it when I get to them. Um… yeah. So, I just wanted to give that little caveat before I start doing this because in American English or English English there might be subtle differences between how you would pronounce these words. So, we’ll dive in.

Different words in English, or Australia English, that you would pronounce like “fork”:

Pork

Cork

Stork

Torque

York

And a few other words that don’t have the “OR” but instead have the “AL” in them, in Australian English at least, you would pronounce exactly the same as “fork”, are:

Walk

Talk

Stalk

Chalk

And obviously if you’re American you would probably pronounce the “R” in things like “fork”, “pork”, “cork”, and instead you would say just “talk”, “stalk”, “chalk”, and you wouldn’t pronounce the “R” [sound]. So that’s the difference there. [It] depends on what your goals are with the accent that you want, but I thought I would just mention that.

Okay. Other words that sound like “fuck” in English:

Buck

Chuck

Cluck

Duck

Guck

Lucky

Pluck

Suck

Puck

Snuck

Struck

So, let’s go over the two different vowel sounds with the “K” at the end, the “or” and the “uh”.

Ork – Uk x 5

And, now we’ll do a few made up and real words with different consonants at the start of them. So, ending in “ork” and “uk” just for you to practice a bit of um… English pronunciation.

Plork – Pluck

Dork – Duck

Blork – Bluck

Thork – Thuck

Mork – Muck

Nork – Nuck

Stork – Stuck

Brork – Bruck

Tork – Tuck

Walk – Wuck

And now we can go through the two different words “fork” and “fuck”, back to back 10 times.

Fork – fuck x 10

So, that’s today’s episode guys. Obviously, I hope you guys can now go to restaurants and be less afraid of asking for things like “forks” in the hope that you won’t accidentally ask your waiter if he can give you a “fuck”. Instead you’ll say, “can you please give me a fork”. So, until next time guys have a good one!

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