What's the worst spelling you've seen?

Verbalee. I met this in IRL.

I am happy that here in Finland you can't name your child whatever you want.
- The downside is, neither can any adult. I think the first name limitations should only apply to kids; legal adults should be able to change their names to whatever they want, no matter how stupid it is. It could only hurt themselves after all
- 'Whatever you want' would be a terrible name
  
  Yep, the government would say no to that name.

Anybody else use their real name as their lemmy user name ?
- You should remember my name, stay away from me or suffer the fates of those who have come before you
- I do :)

Ashley spelled Ashleigh

Tragedeigh
- Kommie-dagh

I would like to provide a counterexample. There are plenty of these people in the US intermountain west, but there are at least some cases where there is no one at fault. Next time you see one of these names without context (though we clearly have the context in this case), before judging, consider Nariaw:
I am a teacher, and one year I found that my roster included a student named "Nariaw". As a public school, we register your student based on what's on the birth certificate. I ask all of my students to pronounce their names for me when I first meet them, for the reason we see in so many of the replies here and with shit like "abcde". However, when this girl came to my class, she said her name was pronounced "Miriam". I spent a good twenty seconds looking at my roster, and had to ask her to spell it for me. I didn't ask any rude and impertinent questions at that point, so it wasn't until a few months later that I got the full story:
Her mother, an immigrant from Ethiopia, was still unfamiliar with Latin script when her daughter was born here in the US. So when she attempted to write out the name, which she wanted to transliterate as "Mariam", she ended up writing only half of the first M, and wrote the second one upside-down. Whoever did the data entry for the government records dutifully recorded the child's name as "Nariaw". Was the mother at fault for being expected to write a name which, while she knew how to represent it in Amharic, she was forced to write in a language in which she was illiterate?
- Wow. Yeah, definitely good to be gracious in that situation!
  Another is, some cultures, not too far from home - like Irish and Welsh - have names written in ways that look Traighdiegh to English, but are the correct/traditional way to spell it for that culture.
- That's super frustrating. The hospital should have easily been able to get someone who had at least a basic grasp of a common language to help ensure they understood the forms and got them filled out correctly.
  The fault is 100% with the hospital.
  
  I would argue that at least 15% of the blame lies with the racist expectation in the US that all names need be anglicized, when we have fucking Unicode. If someone whose second language is English can be expected to be able to pronounce "Rayleigh Monaghan McTavish", then the least that the anglophone people of the US could do is learn to pronounce things in a few other common languages. There is, quite simply, no excuse for the government of the united States, in which there is no official language (even though a traitor, invalidated by the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, had some fuckwit draft a document trying to declare it without congressional approval), to mandate the use of a single language.
- That really qogA.
  ያማል

X Æ A-Xii . I could not resist. I apologize.
- Apology not necessary.

I was at a medical appointment, and the (very cute) nurse was named "Kaelea" pronounced Kaylee.
- I once worked with a Kaylee, but she pronounced it Kali, like Cali-fornia, or Kali-mah...
  Took me a month to get that sorted in my head.
- Sure it was Caileigh?
  
  Jup, Caileeh for sure.

- Congrats to my brother Jerry and his stepdaughter!
  💀
  
  Omg I didn't even notice that at first
- Can we just start using cosmic horror entity names already? Reighfyl is definitely something I could see being some sort of Lovecraftian alien
  
  Think they'll name their next daughter Cheaughtgeughn?
- Wonder what his wife thinks of this pregnancy

The solution is to put all of the uniqueness in the middle name. Then you still get to feel “special” while not forcing your kid to go by “tragedeigh” or whatever.
When I chose my name - I made my first as milquetoast and appropriate to my age as possible. My middle I went balls out - I guarantee I have a cooler middle name than you do.
- I found Kyle "The Yellow Dart" Smith, everyone!
- That's if you can choose a middle name at all. In many places (including where I am) you only get to choose the given name, then the middle name is for example the father's, and the last name is the family name.
- How dare you. You dont beat me, Faustus
  
  I named myself after two scientists, whose work I share with the world regularly 😉

I named my son Jaxin because my wife wanted Jax and I didn't want my son to have a dog's name.
I regret not just naming him Jackson because nobody in Taiwan knows how to pronounce Jaxin.
- Sorry, you are not legally permitted to name your son Jackson unless you carry the name Jack yourself.
- Hate to pile on, but could have done Jackson and then called him Jax for short just as easily. Hell Dick is short for Richard, short names don't have to be spelled the same.
  
  I know. That is why I said i regret not just naming him Jackson. It's too late now. His passports and legal name in 2 countries are already set. It would be hell to change it now.
  
  Could have named him Jacob and called him Jax.
- JaXin would, I believe, be a normal Chinese name - but pronounced quite differently!
  
  Ya people call him Ja Sin.

Toneigh 🐴🐴🐴. As in Toni or Tony.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2018/11/29/little-girl-named-abcde-was-mocked-by-southwest-gate-agent-airline-has-apologized/
A girl named Abcde
tbf, it supposed to ve pronounced Absedee. which isn't ugly phonetically, but being named Abcde???
- Now that you spell it out, Absedee (or maybe Abesede?) is actually kind of cute and not too hard to read. The parents could have spelled it phonetically and then later explained it comes from abcde.
  
  "Abesede" is getting too close to "obesity", but I think "Absedee" works. But yeah, people need to stop trying to use letters and symbols to replace the phonemes of that letter's name.

I once had a student named Dominca. It was supposedly pronounced Duh-mawn-i-ca. She would get very irritated that people “didn’t know how to read” when they pronounced it doh-minca

Nothing could be worse than X Æ A-12.
- Can you just use all of unicode in the US for baby names?
- That is like a grandma reading a hash out loud
  
  I’m now thinking of that classic post from the old site that shows someone’s painstakingly cursive-written note of the entire text of a bluescreen (the old bluescreen with a lot of characters on screen) for tech support.
  And thinking of a slightly more tech inclined grandma who doesn’t quite get all of it having a problem with a torrent and just reading the infohash/magnet link to the ISP’s support call center.
  
  ...what kinda hash?
- Yeah that dude is obsessed with x. He slaps it everywhere he can
  
  That's what happens when you prevent your kid from exploring X sites till your adulthood
- There are a lot of reasons why musk should be (and soon enough will be) jailed, this is one of them. This is child abuse, literally
  
  In the USA, rich people are quite obviously above the law, so no, I don't think he will.
  
  What makes you so confident?

There's a girl in my kid's class named Eighmee. Pronounced "Amy". I thought it was weird but there's a street in a neighboring town named Eighmee Street.
- Wow. So maybe it wasn't an "I'm so new and unique" Traighdiegh. I wonder what the history of Eighmee Street is.
- Eighew! Ouarew?

The guiness book of records had an entry for the worst spelling in the old days before the book was dumbed down. Trying to spell 'usage' the incorrect attempt was youzitch achieving only one correct letter.
- Does using French count? Then I nominate "eau". Impressive 300% bloat, 0 correct letters.
  
  I present to you the plural : eaux 400% bloat still 0correct letters

Brayden, Hayden, jayden, tayden, kayden, rayden, shayden, cayden, pretty much the whole alphabet ending in den. And yes I met every single one of these
- None of those are bad. It's when it's when it's like Breighleigh or stuff that it's bad.
  
  Welp found taydens mom
  
  Breighden.
- Most of these are normal names tf 💀

I knew a guy so ghetto he got his first name as his Xbox Live Gamertag.

A girl in highschool whose name was Nazanine went by Nazi (Nah zee). Like, why? Your name was beautiful.
- Edit: sorry, replied to the wrong comment
- I don't have an issue with that depending on where you are. It's a nice name but lends itself well to a shortening of nahzee. In my area of the US and in the UK they often pronounce Nazi as Naht-zee so I don't think it's as bad as it could be.
  
  Yeah when she said it, it wasn't as bad because this was in Canada and we pronounce it like you guys do, too. It's just that she actually SPELLED it that way. It was so weird.

"Shithead"
Pronounced: shi-THEED
Spelled: Shit Head
- How can it be legal to literally name your kid an insult? Child protection gotta intervene.
  
  Parents of Richards are very upset by this.
  
  It's an Indian name, so the spelling is a bit weird.
- “It’s pronounced “Weener-Slave.””
- I'm Shithead and I'm allergic to my tongue
  (Piped)

I once met a girl called "Xinhergi" (Synergy).
- Looks like its the name of a Daedric lord or something.
  
  Daedric lord of soul crushing corporate vocabulary.
  
  You are thinking about Xivilai from Oblivion, not lords, but daedric dudes who don't hold their punches.
- I once met a girl called Xinhergi
  Who thrived on late-night energy.
  She’d moan and she’d grind,
  With a very keen mind
  For positions defying liturgy.
- This has to be a muskspawn.

"Breighdone" (Brayden) is probably the most egregious one I haven't brain-bleached yet.
My friend works in the billing department of a local hospital, and she will occasionally text me some crazy spellings she comes across.
- yeah that's literally a HIPAA violation lol
  esp if the spelling is that unique, it's definitely identifying info
  
  It probably would get her in some hot water, but a first name alone is a gray area. It becomes a definite violation if it’s combined with health information, even as simple “a baby was born here with the name X”. If she just says “I saw a name spelled X” then it may not be a violation of the law, but the hospital would probably still can her for it.

Anferny.
- Penny Hardaway was legit!

La-a (Pronounced La-dash-ah) is the weirdest one I've seen
- I've seen that as La-ah. Somehow La-a is so much worse.
  
  Found an interesting snopes article about that.
- Seems to be an urban legend tough. Also racist.
  https://lemmy.world/comment/17103405
  
  I've seen one in real life. Maybe they just carried a fake id card as a joke, but this was in a billing department so I'm assuming it was real.
  
  Yeah the other reply noted the same thing. This would have been about ~2015 and she was in pre-k so someone must have named their kid based on the legend. I can't recall if the girl was black or not but I don't think she was.
- The first time I read that it was le-a , which could be read as lea without the dash
- The dash don't be silent

Not so much the spelling, just... I went to school with a girl who's father fled the law and they ended up near us in Canada... they were originally from a trailer park in Tennessee
Her name was "Dollarina"
- That name is a trajideh.
- Literally the "why did mum name me Rose" meme.
- Hopefully she didn't become a prostitute
- Dollarina Cappocino

Abcde (pronounced AB-sid-ee) was certainly memorable if nothing else.
- Oh dear lord no
- I’ve seen this name also in the wild. Girl was pretty fat too. Poor kid.
- I remember reading an article about an airport staff person ( possibly TSA? ) laughing about a little girls name. Same exact name. Crazy stuff that any parent could start their children at square -3 upon being born.
- Reminds me of that kids book CDB
- I fully came in here with this name in mind. Lol in the 10 years since I've first heard it, I've never come across anyone else who has heard the same. I somehow hope we're all running into the same Abcde and there aren't just hordes of them out there.
- This is actually a tuff name

T'Fanny for Tiffany. She's about 30 now, so that was a bad decision from a long time ago.
- T'Fanny sounds like the name of a Vulcan stripper lol.
  
  Worst lap dance in the quadrant ..... yeah right it was scientifically measured and performed
  
  Fkn lol!
- Hope she never goes to Britain...
  
  How did Americans get fanny backwards but they wear fanny packs correctly?

"Heulyn" pronounced Hay-lynn.
- That's spelt 100% correctly in Welsh.

I used to know an Alyssa whose name was pronounced like Alicia. Her parents went let's give her one name but spell it just like another name.
- I used to work with someone who changed a letter for their child’s name, then posted on Facebook moaning cause people spelt it the correct way (Not the way they had spelt it.), in the comments someone posted how they had deliberately spelt their child’s name some different way and were complaining that everyone was spelling it properly. Can’t remember either names or spellings now, this was well over a decade ago.
- Weird. I knew an Alicia who pronounced it Alyssa.
  
  Cultural thing too. Sometimes words in their language are translated weirdly.

For once I’m on the cop’s side.

I haven’t met any one with a terribly spelt name but one girl I worked with was named America. Weird as hell if you ask me
- Is it that uncommon?
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Ferrera
  
  Is it a feminine form of Amerigo maybe?
  
  Dont know. But its weird as hell
- Many people are named after places. This one doesn't feel weird to me atleast
  
  I understand naming a kid after a city or region/state but a country seems a little far.
  
  I also had a coworker named America and I'm pretty sure her parents were immigrants - English was pretty clearly not my coworker's first language. I think it works for her situation. (Funny enough, it was her reckless behavior that caused me to spend my last few weeks at that job on light duty...)
  There's also America Ferrera, I don't think the name is that weird.
  
  Most places are named after people too
  
  Yup, I've known a Kenya, a Lesotho, and a Latierra (the Earth in Spanish).
  
  But which America is it? North or south?
- There was a player on Big Brother named America, which was a tiny bit confusing because the show routinely refers to the audience as America
- I know a Paris, a Virginia, and a Georgia, just off the top of my head. Location names are weird, but not unheard of.
  
  I was briefly married to a Georgia, but the family wasn't Southern. The fathers name was George and that is also what he named his first son, so his first daughter was Georgia.
  Never have understood the phenomenon of fathers passing down their name, you've already cursed your child with the family name, why make things harder on the poor whelp?
  
  The names were first. The locations are named after names.
  Even America was a name first.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci
  
  Those were all human names first. Places named after people, not the other way around.
- Related

Jewelee (Julie) because they wanted Jewel in there I guess
- Once had a friend who said she had 3 middle names. Then she said what I thought I heard as Julianne. I thought she was joking and laughed at her joke.
  Then she got mad, called me stupid, then clarified that her 3 middle names were Jewel Lee Ann.
  I still thought she was joking. She was not.
  
  I have a friend with three middle names too but he seemed used to people being confused and just told me where they came from.
- It sounds like theres two people named Ellie. One of whom is Jewish.
  And they decided to distinguish her by calling her Jew Ellie.
  
  Ah the original working name for the villain of 101 Damnations. Jew Ellie DeVille. That was Walt's contribution.
- Jewel is a perfectly fine name on its own, wtf
- Even Jewelie would have been better despite being atrocious on its own
- Why did I read this in Chris-Chans voice???? Why am I this brainrotted?

I knew a guy once whose last name was "EA." Two capital letters. He pronounced it "Yeah." His first name was Rodrake.
- I guess it wasnt in the name afterall
  (Is it "ea sports its in the game or name"?)
  
  E A Sports, its in the blame!
  
  Wasn't it, EA sports, it's in the lame?

A kid whose name is said "Akelah" phonetically, but is spelled "Akleah".
- The parents probably pronounce "nuclear" as "nucular".

Not a baby name but I worked with a devops engineer who had dyslexia so all of our IaC variable names had misspellings in them. We just lived with it because it would have been expensive to teardown the resources and reprovision them with the correct spellings.

I've encountered a lot of the reverse of this. Danielle pronounced "Dah Nell". Brittany pronounced "Brih Tanny". Jonathan pronounced "Joe Nathan".
- Jonathan pronounced "Joe Nathan"
  I would call that fucker Jonah-T-Han purely out of spite.
  
  There was also a "Jathan" and it wath tho hard to thay hith name without thlipping into a lithp.

I had a customer once at an old job whose name was spelled Deborah. Seems completely normal until she got super mad at me for calling her "Debra" because I was somehow supposed to know her name was pronounced "Deb-Or-Ah". With the "Or" being stressed.
- Clearly named after the girl in Disco 2000.
- Tell debdeb to calm down

A-aron?
- Better than bl-ake
  
  Jay Quellin? Dee-nice?

Keighty / Keeeeeeee
- K eighty? Katie? K80? Lord that's a new low.
- Is Keeeeeeee related to Potoooooooo the racehorse?
  
  Related. No. But there was that one party in Tijuana...

kayleigh and stuff like that is pretty common where I'm from.
- Have you run into a Teancum?
  For those that are not up on your mormonisms, it's pronounced:
  Tea-an-cum
  An it's a boy's name.
  
  I'm always up for tea n' cum with the boys.
  
  Tea-an-sum
  or
  Tea-an-kum?
- But which one is cuter: Kayleigh or Kaylee?
  
  Kaylee, and it is readable using only English grammar rules (the -eigh uses rules from a different language like Sean does)
- Morridor is the funniest name I’ve ever heard of for the Wasatch front (shot in the dark)

Brayden, Braxton, Bentley, Aiden, Axel, Keith.
- Axel is the normal spelling around here (Switzerland), so I'm interested what you would have expected instead? Aksel?
  
  Maybe it's Excel
- What's wrong with Axel?
- You might dislike those names, but there nothing really wrong with their spellings.
- Ugh, no! Brayden is fine. Breighden is the problem.
  
  Brayden is a problem. Breighden is a tragedeigh.

Tree Grill. Real dude. Wacky parents.
- Jesus
  
  Not that bad of a spelling...

LaQuisha. I think there was an apostrophe or two thrown in there but I don't recall where or even the spelling exactly at that was ~26 years ago in highschool. I just recall the LaQ... There were several that I do not recall specifically ATM that seemed like their folks were trying to find the most unrelated syllables to link into a name. It was funny to me. It was a school in Tennessee designed for Uni prep that was supposed to uplift people in the surrounding poorer black community. There were several black students that acted like they always had a chip on their shoulder (aggravated, just looking for any excuse to argue or fight). These are the kids that typically had the most odd names. It was funny because I viewed them like the inverse of typical white trailer trash also present in the area but not at that school. The rednecks seemed to name all their kids some indecisive hyphenated name like Mary-Ann or Betty-Sue while the equivalently backwards black families went with stuff like Keishfonda and Quinmothy. Like y'all are doing the same thing thinking you're different.
- I think the weird-ass names are an attempt not for the parents to be different, but a generally severely misguided desire for their kids to appear different in a "Wowee, that's special" kinda way. Everyone else has a 'normal' name. But not my kid; my child is so different and special and s/he's going places, s/he's gonna get out of here & do important things or be a famous athlete.
  As we know, oftentimes that's simply not the case...and it's just a nightmare for the rest of us (and that child) to spell, say, etc. I find it incredibly frustrating, even though I know this wasn't their choice, but their parents'. If their last name is weird shit, I politely ask for the first name. If the first name is also weird shit, I politely make a best guess phonetic whatever & move on.
  Fun fact, it's not exactly ghetto made-up name territory, but Oprah Winfrey.....isn't Oprah. Her given name is Orpah, named after a biblical figure in the book of Ruth. Very obscure, ancient name! Nobody knew how to spell or pronounce it properly, and they started calling her Oprah instead. 🙂 Now...we've got Oprah.
  
  or be a famous athlete.
  Hol up I'll be right back..
  one
  two
  and three
  
  Well, it's not like some with a common name like Michael for instance can ever be really famous. Even less if you have a common surname, like Jackson, or Jordan.

Potoooooooo
- Quite the stud as I recall
  
  Hung like a horse

I knew of an African-American named Le-a.
Not spoken as “ley-ah”, but as “ledasha”.
Because you are supposed to say the dash.
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/le-a/
  
  I appreciate you posting the snopes. I am more bothered than I probably should be when someone claims this is real and if OP is willing to lie about something so mundane then none of their posts should be believed.
- I too have been to the internet.

La-A, it's pronounced La-Dash-A
My mom taught nursing and La-A was one of her students, she said her mother had her at 15 after dropping out of highschool her freshman year and wanted a unique name for her.
Edit Ok wow, I did not know that there was a racist aspect about this name. Sorry I didn't go into more detail originally. She was real, and from what little interaction I had with her she was a very nice and down to earth woman, who put herself through nursing school. I met her at the pinning ceremony because I always ran the audio for it to help my mom out. I didn't get to spend any meaningful time talking to her, but I heard her name called out when it was her turn on stage to get her pin and saw her come up and receive her nursing pin.
Again I had no idea about the racist aspect of this name, if I had I would have either given more detail upfront or just not posted. I've met a handful of people with interesting sounding and spelled names and didn't think anything about it when originally posting. I apologize if anyone felt I was being offensive.
- Crazy to me that this is still going around. I remember hearing this myth back when I was in middle school almost 20 years ago.
  Its almost certainly untrue and probably racist. Though there are women named Ladasha fully spelled out.
  
  Oh this is way older than 20 years old. My grandpa was telling this joke like 50 years ago. He also was a school teacher, I suspect it has been circulating through schools for the last 60+ years.
  
  What's with the <!--- comments that seem to add a level of snark to the article? Did some editor try an fail to insert these into the html source only?
  
  Thank you for letting me know about that, please see my edit to the original post.
- Did she say, "and the dash don't be silent"?
  
  Please see my edit on the original post.
- Wait I also knew a La-a. Now I'm worried that there are multiple...