The 19 Hardest Tongue Twisters Ever Written

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Say it three times fast, and you’ll understand why it’s the one everyone learns first, and almost nobody finishes properly. It’s older than you’d guess, too: the line first reached print in 1813, inside a London book called Peter Piper’s Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation, one twister for every letter of the alphabet. It never really went out of print. The whole thing sits in the public domain today, free to read on Project Gutenberg exactly as it was typeset two centuries ago.

Why does a phrase like that fall apart under speed? In December 2013, the MIT psychologist Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel built something even nastier in the lab: “pad kid poured curd pulled cod.” Volunteers offered a prize for saying it ten times fast, but they simply couldn’t get through it. Around the same time, a UCSF team led by the neurosurgeon Edward Chang mapped the brain while people spoke and found the reason why.

The brain doesn’t organise speech based on how sounds sound. It organises them by how the muscles have to move, and tongue twisters cram together sounds whose muscle instructions almost completely overlap. Your tongue isn’t failing you. Two nearly identical commands are arriving at once, and it has to choose.

Here are nineteen of the hardest tongue twisters we could find. Try saying them out loud on a slow morning, ideally with someone nearby to laugh at you.

Take on These Extremely Hard 19 Tongue Twisters

1. 1. She sells sea shells by the seashore.
2. 2. If a dog chews shoes, whose shoes does he choose?
3. 3. How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?
4. 4. I have got a date at a quarter to eight; I’ll see you at the gate, so don’t be late.
5. 5. Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn’t fuzzy, was he?
6. 6. Send toast to ten tense stout saints’ ten tall tents.
7. 7. Six sick hicks nick six slick bricks with picks and sticks.
8. 8. Round the rough and rugged rock the ragged rascal rudely ran.
9. 9. Rory the warrior and Roger the worrier were reared wrongly in a rural brewery.
10. 10. Betty bought a bit of butter. But the butter Betty bought was bitter. So Betty bought a better butter, and it was better than the butter Betty bought before.
11. 11. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? He would chuck, he would, as much as he could, and chuck as much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
12. 12. The thirty-three thieves thought that they thrilled the throne throughout Thursday.
13. 13. English can be understood through tough, thorough thought, though.
14. 14. Brisk brave brigadiers brandished broad bright blades, blunderbusses, and bludgeons, balancing them badly.
15. 15. Silly Sally swiftly shooed seven silly sheep. The seven silly sheep Silly Sally shooed shilly-shallied south. These sheep shouldn’t sleep in a shack; sheep should sleep in a shed.
16. 16. I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish, but if you wish the wish the witch wishes, I won’t wish the wish you wish to wish.
17. 17. If you must cross a coarse, cross cow across a crowded cow crossing, cross the cross, coarse cow across the crowded cow crossing carefully.
18. 18. The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick. (The closest thing to an official record holder: Guinness featured it in 1974, the last year it kept the category.)
19. 19. Pad kid poured curd pulled cod. (MIT’s laboratory-built contender, first presented in 2013.)

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