How to pronounce mischievous

Short answer: say MIS-chuh-vus (/ˈmɪstʃəvəs/): three syllables, stressed on the first, as in mischief. This three-syllable version is the first or only pronunciation in Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, Dictionary.com, American Heritage and Collins. Cambridge (UK), Collins (British) and Oxford Learner's Dictionaries (British and American) write the middle vowel as a short "ih": MIS-chih-vus (/ˈmɪstʃɪvəs/). The four-syllable mis-CHEE-vee-us is widespread, but Merriam-Webster labels it nonstandard.

Listen

Count the syllables: three in the first recording, four in the second.

Is it mischievous or mischievious?

Mischievous, said with three syllables, is the standard. The other versions move the stress to the second syllable, and one adds a syllable that isn't in the spelling:

In the Harvard Dialect Survey, an online survey of American English by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder at Harvard, 11,296 people answered this question: 47.7% said three syllables, 26.3% four, 19.4% both, and 6% said they write mischievous but say mischievious. So about half used four syllables at least sometimes. In a 2007 online poll of British speakers for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, run by the phonetician John Wells and the publisher Pearson Longman (800 to 825 answers per question), 65% preferred MIS-chih-vus, 15% mis-CHEE-vus and 20% mis-CHEE-vee-us. Neither was a random sample. In an informal class poll, University of Michigan English professor Anne Curzan found that around half of her students said they use the nonstandard version (Michigan Public, 2020).

Merriam-Webster has modern examples of mis-CHEE-vee-us from dialect speakers to President Herbert Hoover, but still labels it nonstandard, because many people consider it wrong.

So which mischievous pronunciation should you use? Say MIS-chuh-vus: it's the only version every dictionary above treats as standard. Mis-CHEE-vee-us has a long history, but some listeners will hear it as a mistake.

Why is mischievous pronounced with three syllables?

Because it's mischief plus -ous (Dictionary.com), and mischief is stressed on the first syllable: MIS-chif. Mischief goes back to Old French meschever, "to come out badly", from mes- (English mis-) and chief ("head, end"). Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of mischievous to the 14th century.

Three things pull speakers toward four syllables:

• The ie looks like "ee", as in chief, and that pulls the stress onto the second syllable (Dictionary.com).
• The ending sounds like -ious. Random House traces the extra syllable to previous and devious. As Merriam-Webster editor Emily Brewster put it in a 2011 video, nothing rhymes with MIS-chuh-vus.
• The -ious ending moves the stress. The linguist Arnold Zwicky notes that -ious adjectives are stressed just before the ending: labor, laborious.

The variants are old. The Oxford English Dictionary, as quoted by Zwicky, says stress on the second syllable was common in literature until at least 1700, and the four-syllable form, attested since the 16th century, probably grew out of it. Dictionary.com, citing the OED, says mischievious was a fairly standard alternative spelling from about the 16th to the 18th century.

How to say mischievous step by step

1. Count three syllables: MIS · chuh · vus.
2. Stress the first one: "MIS", like miss, the same as in mischief.
3. Keep the middle syllable short and weak: "chuh" or "chih". Not "CHEE".
4. End with "vus", as in nervous. The spelling has no i after the v, so there's no "ee" before the ending.

MISH-chuh-vus, with an SH sound before the CH, is fine too: Merriam-Webster lists it. Just don't add a fourth syllable.

Practice in a sentence

• Our mischievous cat knocks my pens off the desk.
• She gave him a mischievous look and said nothing.
• Mischief, mischievous, mischievously: the stress stays on MIS.

Then try related words: grievous and nervous end in "vus", like mischievous, but devious ends in "vee-us". American pronunciations, from the Cambridge Dictionary:

Stress and extra sounds trip people up in other words too: see how to pronounce hyperbole, tinnitus, February and espresso, or our list of 45 commonly mispronounced words.

What does mischievous mean?

Mischievous means causing trouble in a playful way: think of a child who plays tricks, or a grin that says a joke is coming. It can also mean harmful, or meant to cause trouble, as in mischievous rumors. That's the older sense: Merriam-Webster's first known use, from the 14th century, is the harmful one, and Oxford Learner's Dictionaries dates the playful meaning to the late 17th century.

Sources

• Merriam-Webster — mischievous and mischief
• Cambridge Dictionary — mischievous; Oxford Learner's Dictionaries — mischievous
• Dictionary.com — mischievous, pronunciation note; American Heritage — mischievous; Collins — mischievous, with the Random House usage note
• Wiktionary — mischievous and mischievious
• Merriam-Webster — 'Mispronunciations' That May Be Fine, Ask the Editor video with Emily Brewster, December 2011, and You're (Probably) Saying It Wrong
• Arnold Zwicky's Blog — Linking i, March 2009, quoting the Oxford English Dictionary
• Harvard Dialect Survey — mischievous vs. mischievious, Bert Vaux and Scott Golder, 2003 (archived copy); John Wells, UCL — LPD 2007 poll results (archived copy)
• Michigan Public — TWTS: Pondering pronunciation preferences, Anne Curzan and Rebecca Hector, September 2020