WHEEL of Fortune has caused a division between fans over one of its recent episodes.
Viewers were left with conflicted reactions after a contestant suffered a major loss after mispronouncing a solved puzzle.
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Earlier this month, mom-of-three Shauna competed against contestants Steve and Melissa when the epic fail took place.
After all taking turns guessing letters during a round with the category of “Same Letter,” Shauna ended up with a fully-solved puzzle.
All she had left to do in order to win the round was read aloud what the board said.
Host Pat Sajak, 77, asked her to do just that, but it unfortunately didn’t go too smoothly.
The Wheel of Fortune puzzle read, “Congenial company & clever conversation.”
Shauna, meanwhile, read it as, “Conjugal company & clever conversation.”
Shocked crowd members gasped, Pat said a quick, “No,” and the next player, Steve, was able to win after going on to read it correctly.
“Yeah, we needed kind of a coined word there you had. I’m sorry,” Pat told Shauna of her surprising mistake.
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Fans were left divided over Shauna losing the puzzle simply for reading one word incorrectly, despite the puzzle being solved.
“When someone mispronounces a word it may be because they learned it from reading instead of hearing it said,” one upset fan wrote on social media.
“No way this lady lost Wheel of Fortune with the entire puzzle solved,” wrote a second fan on X (formerly Twitter).
Others, though, accepted Shauna’s loss and thought it was the right call.
“She didn’t mispronounce she gave a completely different word,” one fan tweeted.
“Always has been the rule since day 1,” a second viewer explained.
Losing a solved puzzle by mispronouncing the phrase doesn’t happen often, but it has been happening for years, just as the one fan claimed.
In 2014, a contestant infamously failed a puzzle after incorrectly pronouncing the word “Achilles” while reading a completed board.
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