The Price Is Right is nothing short of an American institution, widely considered one of the best game shows of all time with its 53rd season currently airing on the 2025 TV schedule. One would think that by now it’s a pretty well-oiled machine, but according to announcer George Gray, that’s not exactly true. Turns out there’s one faux pas he struggles with consistently, and producers have to step in to help.
George Gray has been calling on excited audience members to “Come on down!” for 14 years. So it goes without saying that he’s pretty much a pro at the job by this point. However, he told TV Insider there’s one part of announcing the next contestant on The Price Is Right that he continues to get wrong. Gray said:
If your name’s Andrea, [Ann dreea] I’ll call you Andrea [Awn drea]. If it’s Tara [Tare-a] I’ll call you Tara [Tar-a]. If your last name was Wojaho, I’ll call you Smith. It’s a trainwreck. I go out in front of the audience and do a little what we call warm-up for a couple moments before we start the show. And I always say, ‘I just want you to be prepared. I’m going to mess up your name. So I will try to do my very best, but I’m going to butcher it, and I’m sorry.’
I mean, we should probably cut the man some slack when it comes to this part of his job. After all, some names can be harder to pronounce than others. At the very least, now future contestants get some warning (and an apology in advance) for George Gray mispronouncing their names. (And honestly, if I’m winning a new car or some epic Showcase Showdown, you can call me whatever you’d like.)
However, after 14 years of the same sort of slip-ups, it’s no surprise that The Price Is Right has found a way to help out the announcer. On the surface, this method is relatively simple, but it also seems to be effective. Gray continued:
Every time I say a name, no matter how wrong I say it, there’s somebody on stage that holds up a cue card, and in huge, ginormous letters, is that person’s name, so first and last name. No matter what I do to their name, it’s still there. So that’s, that’s how foolproof we’ve gotten.
It’s actually not hard to see how this could be a constant problem for him, though. Unlike other game shows like Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy!, you’re not just dealing with three pre-determined contestants. George Gray has a whole audience full of potential Pinko players. As he pointed out above, there are also so many ways to say seemingly simple names. Gray compared it to other differently pronounced words, saying:
Yeah, that happens all the time where, you know, is it Caribbean or Caribbean, right? And I’ll ask the producers, and sometimes they’ll just say ‘tomato tomato. It’s your choice.’ But I know somebody’s gonna go, ‘He’s doing it wrong.’
The good thing for George Gray is that the home audience at least never knows about these faux pas. It’s certainly not as obvious as when a contestant called Drew Carey the wrong name or when one woman couldn’t figure out how to leave the stage. I appreciate the announcer’s willingness to be so candid about his flubs, and I’ll surely be thinking about them whenever I watch the show moving forward.
If you want to catch the announcer in action — and try to guess whether or not he mispronounced each contestant’s name — you can catch The Price Is Right at 11 a.m. ET weekdays on CBS.
