Welcome To The Quality Leader In Karaoke

Karaoke is a Japanese word, translated loosely as "empty orchestra". It's an abbreviation of the Japanese words "karappo" (empty) and "okesutura" (orchestra) but when it made the transition to English the original pronunciation seems to have been forgotten. You'll probably hear most folks pronounce it "carry OH key", but the Japanese pronunciation is closer to "car OH kay". You can follow this link and hear a woman pronounce karaoke the way the Japanese do.

Spelling the word is another story. Mistakes seem to fall into 2 categories, those of mistyping and those of just not knowing.

One common misspelling we see often is when someone emails us and says, "I want to buy some kareoke". This seems understandable as they are spelling it more like it is pronounced in the US - with the sound a of long "e" in the middle of the word. Another common mispelling that probably arises from just not paying attention is "karioke". With both kareoke and karioke it appears as if people are just guessing phonetically and missing the mark by a bit.

One spelling which seems to be more of a finger slip while typing is the spelling "karoake". Karoake seems to be a case of transposing the two letters "a" and "o" while typing, but we've also heard people pronounce the word "kah row key" or even "crow key", so who really knows for sure. Maybe again they are just spelling it like it sounds to them.

Something else we see is people wanting to add a double-e to the end of the word. So we get kareokee, kariokee, karoakee and even the main root spelled correctly but with that extra e: karaokee.

Have you seen people pronounce or spell karaoke in a different or unusual way? Let us know the details and we'd enjoy posting your story here.

No matter how you choose to pronounce karaoke, we hope you'll check out our line of karaoke accompaniment track. Search by your favorite song or artist to purchase a track on a CDG, or even order a custom karaoke disc with just your favorite songs.