Kesha Reveals the Super Common Way People Mispronounce Her Name

Kesha has been in the public eye for over 10 years now, but there are still people that mispronounce her name. In a TikTok this week, the musician, whose full name is Kesha Rose Sebert, responded to a prompt from another user who asked, “Tell me what your name is and then tell me what people mispronounce it as.”

“My name is Kesha. Keh-sha,” Kesha said, clearly enunciating her name. “Not Keisha. Not Ketchup. Kesha.” In her caption, she confirmed, “Not ketchup!” On the same day, Kesha’s mom, Pebe Sebert, discussed her daughter’s name in a TikTok video on her own page. “The name Kesha’s actually a Hungarian family name that [Kesha’s older brother] Lagan would have been named if he had been a girl,” Pebe said. “But since he wasn’t, the name is actually pronounced Ket-ta-cha in Hungarian and so I decided to make it easier and to make it Kesha. And that’s where Kesha came from.”

When Kesha released her first single, “Tik Tok,” in 2009, she went by Ke$ha, eventually dropping the dollar sign from her name in 2014 after leaving a two-month treatment program for an eating disorder. In 2017, Kesha told Refinery 29 that she ditched the dollar sign in an effort to embrace her authentic self.

“It [losing the $] happened after I went to rehab for my eating disorder,” she said. “I let go of my facade about being a girl who didn’t care. My facade was to be strong, and I realized it was total bulls—. I took out the dollar sign because I realized that was part of the facade. It was a journey and I’m happy — that was me in that part of my life. But then I turned a corner, but I still have a f—ing tattoo of it on my hand. I’ll have to figure that out!”

She added, “It’s empowering to sit with my imperfections and be real and vulnerable. In truth, there’s real power. I used to nitpick everything and it was f—ing exhausting. Now I’m feelin’ myself.” Kesha released her most recent album, High Road, in January 2020. She was scheduled to tour to promote the record beginning in April 2020, but the trek was postponed and ultimately canceled due to the pandemic.