I occasionally hear this.
Problem:
“Pronunciate” is a slang verb that makes the speaker sound dumb.
Explanation:
“Pronunciate” is a back-formation of the noun “pronunciation”.
Maybe some people who use “pronunciate” know that the noun “obligation” and the verb “obligate” go together and therefore believe that “pronunciation” and “pronunciate” go together.
I have heard “pronunciate” or one of its ‘conjugations’ in sentences such as these:
- “She did not pronunciate well.”
- “I was repeatedly pronunciating it to the telphone operator.”
- “He pronunciated the words with a Californian accent.”
At least in my experience, it seems as if some of those who say “pronunciate” are trying to sound more intelligent than those who are listening to them. After all, “pronunciate” is longer than “pronounce”, so the former must be a “fancier” word than the latter (or at least that’s their reasoning).
Whatever the reason, “pronunciate” makes the speaker sound dumb.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “pronounce” — 11,700,000 matches
- “pronunciate” — 817,000 matches
This tells me that Web authors have written the correct word vs. the incorrect word by a ratio of 14.3-to-1, which is not good, especially given nearly a million matches for the incorrect word.
Solution:
“Pronounce”