From ‘Res-er-vwah’ to ‘Lawnceston’: butchering the names of places Australians call home

Mispronouncing locations is something we've all done and heard, but which of our cities and towns do we garble the most?

A suburb in Melbourne's north has been giving Victoria's top health officials some difficulty. It's not Wollert, where the current outbreak originated, or Craigieburn, home to one of the most worrying exposure sites.

It's Reservoir. Keen watchers of Victoria's daily coronavirus press conferences will have noticed that the state's health officials, able to confidently rattle off extremely long updates about the latest cases and exposure sites, keep tripping over the pronunciation of this suburb by making it too fancy. The actual name is pronounced Res-er-vore, rhymes with door, with the -voir pronounced like the Latin term voir dire. It's not Res-er-vwah - like the dam containing drinking water.