Business English words people mispronounce in meetings
Entrepreneur, niche, hierarchy — words that show up constantly in meetings and get quietly mangled. A practice list of 152 business words with IPA to check.
30-second version: A small set of business words cause outsized trouble because they're borrowed from French or Latin, spelled in ways that don't match their sound, or simply rare enough that most speakers have read them far more than they've said them. sayit's Business English list has 152 of these words with IPA and a check, built for exactly this blind spot.
Meetings are a bad place to discover you've been mispronouncing a word for years. Nobody corrects you — it would be rude, or awkward, or just not worth the interruption — so the habit compounds silently. Here are the repeat offenders, and why each one specifically causes trouble.
The usual suspects
| Word | Common mistake | Why it happens |
|---|---|---|
| entrepreneur | Stress or vowel misplaced | French loanword; the "-eur" ending isn't native English spelling |
| niche | Said "nitch" or "neesh" inconsistently | Two accepted pronunciations exist, which itself causes hesitation |
| hierarchy | Extra or dropped syllable | Five syllables hiding in a word that looks shorter on the page |
| liaise / liaison | Vowel sequence guessed wrong | Rare outside business writing, so rarely heard spoken |
| forte (strength) | Said "for-TAY" like the music term | A different loanword with a different pronunciation, easily confused |
| synergy | Stress on the wrong syllable | Looks like it should stress the second syllable; it doesn't |
| onboarding | Fine to say, easy to mumble | Compound word said too fast, syllables collapse together |
| cache (data) | Said like "cash-AY" | Confused with "cachet," a genuinely different word |
Why business vocabulary specifically has this problem
Two things stack up. First, a lot of core business vocabulary is borrowed — French especially (entrepreneur, liaise, forte, niche) — and loanwords don't follow native English stress or spelling rules, so guessing from spelling fails more often than it does for Germanic-root words. Second, this vocabulary is disproportionately read before it's spoken: you'll meet synergy and hierarchy in memos and slide decks for years before a meeting forces you to say them out loud, so the gap between recognition and production has time to grow wide before anyone notices.
How to close the gap before it's a live-meeting moment
- 1.Work the list once, deliberately. Business English vocabulary has 152 words with IPA — read through it and flag anything you say differently from the audio.
- 2.Say flagged words in a full sentence, not isolated. "We need to liaise with the vendor team" tests the word at meeting pace, which is the actual condition you need to get right.
- 3.Build a working deck from what you flag. Flashcards turns a flagged word into a card with IPA and definition, graded from your own spoken attempt, so the words that actually trip you keep resurfacing until they don't.
- 4.Practice the phrase you'll actually say, not just the word — Custom passage practice accepts pasted text, so you can drop in your own recurring meeting phrases ("let's circle back on the hierarchy of priorities") and drill the word in its real context.
The words most worth fixing first
Not every word on the list carries equal weight. Prioritize ones you say often — a word you use in every second meeting is worth ten minutes now; a word you'll say once a year isn't. Cross-reference with your own progress history if you've flagged pronunciation issues in past recordings — recurring flags on the same word are the strongest signal of what to fix first.
Beyond vocabulary: the bigger meeting-confidence picture
Individual word fixes matter, but meetings also live or die on pace and filler words — see fillers: replacing "um" with silence if hesitation is costing you more confidence than mispronunciation is.
Try it: open the Business English list, read the first ten words aloud, and note which ones you'd have said differently five minutes ago.
Hear exactly which sounds to fix.
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