‘Wheel of Fortune’ contestant suffers epic fail on completed puzzle

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A Wheel of Fortune contestant kicked off the New Year with an epic fail after they managed to lose a round by mispronouncing a word on a completed puzzle.

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Shauna Williams successfully pieced together the correct answer in the “SAME LETTER” category to reveal the correct answer “CONGENIAL COMPANY & CLEVER CONVERSATION.” But when she read it back aloud, Williams pronounced the first word as “Con-gin-nal.”

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“Uh, no,” Sajak, 77, said as the puzzle quickly moved on to Steve Sporre, who answered correctly.

“No way this lady lost Wheel of Fortune with the entire puzzle solved,” one viewer wrote, sharing a clip of Williams’ miss and a series of laughing-crying emojis.

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“Is it just me or did Shauna get a raw deal on the R1 puzzle?” one fan asked on social media. “It’s been a while since somebody got buzzed for mispronouncing a word.”

Another viewer questioned Sajak’s rejection saying they “didn’t know pronouncing things correctly was a rule” on the long-running game show.

“I don’t even know what the word ‘congenial’ means, but I damn sure know it’s not pronounced like that,” one person added. “I’m embarrassed for her honestly.”

On Reddit, one watcher blasted Williams, saying, “She was wrong … and quite stupid. Don’t reward wrong and stupid.”

A second commenter took aim at Sporre for the boastful way he went for the solve. “It always rubs us wrong when someone whiffs a seemingly easy puzzle and the next person goes really over the top on the correction guess. Just take your W with grace.”

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This isn’t the first time a mispronunciation has cost a contestant a win. In 2014, Julian Batts mispronounced Achilles’ name as “A-chill-us” in the CHARACTER category.

“Even though the letters are up there, you have to solve it, which is what you did. You have to say it and you said it,” Sajak said.

Following the flub, a Wheel of Fortune spokesperson explained to ABC News, “When a contestant tries to solve a puzzle, they must pronounce it using the generally accepted pronunciation.”

Batts told Good Morning America afterwards that the mistake “hit me like a train.” The college student added, “I really didn’t know how to react to it — the game continued on and [another contestant from] Texas A&M, she solved it and it hit me right then and there that it was Achilles.”

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In 2013, Paul Atkinson, who had landed on the million-dollar wedge, garbled “CORNER CURIO CABINET,” pronouncing “Curio” as “Curro.”

“It just didn’t come out the way you intended,” Sajak said, trying to console him.

Atkinson told ABC News afterwards that the moment was his “biggest nightmare” and that he’d “never seen that word before.”

“I knew I messed up,” he said. “I knew something awesome could’ve happened, but I totally goofed it.”

In 2012, contestant Renee Durette lost $3,850 because she read the phrase “Seven Swans a-Swimming” as “Seven Swans a-Swimmin’.” Durette was flagged for dropping the “g” in the word “swimming.”

“That’s kind of how I speak, you know, being from Florida and I asked for the ‘g’ so I knew it was there,” Durette said.

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Williams’ blunder this week follows Gishma Tabari’s last month when she flubbed a seemingly easy answer that Wheel fans branded as the “worst guess ever.”

With just a handful of letters left on the board for the “SHOW BIZ” category in the triple toss-up round, where letters are revealed one at a time, Tabari stunned host Pat Sajak when she was presented with an almost-solved puzzle, “TH_ _RITI_S _GR_E.”

“The British Ogre,” she blurted.

“Say it again,” Sajak asked. After Tabari repeated her answer, Sajak amusedly replied, “Uh, no.”

One of Tabari’s fellow contestants quickly swooped in with the right answer: “The Critics Agree.”

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“How about that British Ogre? That has to be the worst guess ever,” one person wrote on X.

The amusing moment was exactly what Tabari had hoped wouldn’t happen to her as she fulfilled a lifelong dream to appear on the show.

“The funny part was, right before I went on, I went to my husband, Saman, and I was like … ‘My fear is that I’m gonna go on the show and I’m gonna say or do something stupid that everyone’s gonna laugh,’” she told Fox News Digital, reflecting on her experience.

“That’s exactly what happened.”

X: @markhdaniell

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