Here’s a word that seems to be awfully confusing to native speakers of English, Macedonian and Albanian: “corps.”
If you are starting a new organization or agency, I’d urge you to avoid using the word “corps” in its name because I guarantee a lot of people will get the name wrong. I’ve witnessed many instances of people tripping up over this word, but of course I’ve seen it much more often since joining the Peace Corps.
Native speakers of English will frequently misspell the word. They might write “core,” which is understandable since it’s pronounced like the word “core.” Or they might write “corp,” which is an abbreviation for “corporation” (or, less frequently, “corporal”). I don’t understand why so many native English speakers write “corp,” but it’s a pretty common mistake.
Native speakers of Macedonian and Albanian (and, I presume, many other languages) will have trouble with pronunciation. They see the “ps” at the end of “corps” and don’t realize those letters shouldn’t be pronounced. The word “corps” comes from French, so it doesn’t follow the normal rules of English orthography. So it should be pronounced like the word “core.” In other words, it should rhyme with “more,” “door” and “store.”
Unfortunately, the way native speakers of Macedonian and Albanian often pronounce it sounds like another English word: “corpse.” This means a dead body, especially the dead body of a human. (The dead body of an animal would usually be called a “carcass.” The word “cadaver” is also used for a dead human body, but that is mostly used in a medical context, such as a body to be dissected by medical students.)
The word “corps” is used in English in a variety of ways, many of them having to do with military forces. For example, the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers use the word in their names. In addition to the Peace Corps, the U.S. government has used the word in non-military use in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Corps. Unlike the Peace Corps, those are known as uniformed services, so people working in those corps are issued uniforms, but most of them only wear them for ceremonial occasions. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop was the first surgeon general in many years to wear a uniform regularly.
In addition to the names of organizations, the word “corps” is used in cases like “press corps” to refer to journalists (usually a group of journalists covering a specific source of news, such as the congressional press corps). It is also used in cases like “drum and bugle corps” for a musical group and in the phrase “esprit de corps,” a phrase from French that roughly means “team spirit” or “solidarity.”