Big news today out of Lindsay Lohan’s mouth, and things may never be the same! “Proof You’ve Been Mispronouncing Lindsay Lohan’s Name,” blares a headline on E! News. “Lindsay Lohan Fans Shocked To Learn They’ve Been Mispronouncing Her Name After Star Joins TikTok,” claims the respected U.K. publication The Independent. “Oops, It Turns Out You’ve Probably Been Pronouncing Lindsay Lohan’s Name Wrong This Whole Time,” says UPROXX. Oops!
All these pieces and many more are responding to a TikTok uploaded by Lohan earlier this month, in which she pronounces her name so that it sounds like “Lowen” and not the more phonetic “Lo-han” that people tend to say. She’s been famous for decades now! How on earth could we miss that?
Well, it’s partly because Lohan herself often says “Lo-han,” as you can see in the montage below that spans the time period from a 2010 Judd Apatow-directed American Jewish World Service PSA to Lohan’s 2021 announcement that she’d be joining the fan-connection service Vanywhere.
But! Confusingly, Lohan has on occasion said “Lowen,” too, like in a promo for her 2004 appearance on Saturday Night Live and, more recently in some Cameos (more confusingly: she called herself “Lo-han” in her announcement that she was joining the service). In a 2005 episode of the VH1 show Driven, Lohan’s mother Dina Lohan says “Lowen.”
Can we trust Dina Lohan as an authority on pronouncing her own name? Unclear! Can we trust anything that comes out of Lindsay Lohan’s mouth? Also unclear. This is, after all, a woman who has been known to adopt a confusing accent from time to time. In attempt to explain her varying speech patterns, Lohan/Lowen told Entertainment Tonight in 2019, “I think when I’m around certain dialects, it changes each time…You pick things up along the way.” You also put certain things down, like the way you pronounced your last name yesterday.
