It’s Almost Impossible To Spell All 27 of These Words Right the First Time
August 16, 2024
Back when I was a hiring manager, one of the most common red flags that would cause my co-editor and me to toss out a résumé was spelling errors. Granted, we were hiring writers, so the ability to spell-check was a must. But misspelled words don’t look good on any résumé, or any professional document at all, for that matter.
Here’s the problem: English does NOT make it easy to spell words correctly. The way that some words are spelled seems to go against everything we know about the rules of English. In fact, according to one language expert, about 16% of English words break some kind of spelling rule (Kelley 2024). WHAT. How are we supposed to function in this kind of chaos?
For example, you know how we all learned “i before e except after c”? Sounds like a great rule, right? It works some of the time, unless, of course, you’re writing about your eight weird neighbors who consume neither protein nor caffeine. Awesome.
There are a bunch of words that can trip up even the best spellers among us, so here are 27 of the most commonly misspelled words with explanations about why you might struggle with them and some tips about how to get them right in the future!
Absence
Common misspellings: absense, abcense
In my opinion, “absence” is just being a little bit greedy. It has two “s” sounds, but it wants to use both “s” and “c” to represent them. To remember this, think that neither “s” nor “c” are absent from absence.
Accommodate
Common misspellings: acommodate, accomodate
True to its meaning, “accommodate” is quite accommodating, allowing not just one but TWO sets of double letters. You might think it’s strange to toss so many consonants into one word, but there you have it.
Address
Common misspelling: adress
Like “accommodate,” “address” has a double set of double consonants. In such a short word, it feels weird to have more than half of it be taken up by “d”s and “s”s!
Across
Common misspelling: accross
After two words that seem to have too many sets of double consonants, “across” surprises us by having just one. I think the main trouble with this word is how similar it is to “address” in its sound, so we want to treat it the same and double up that second letter.
Basically
Common misspelling: basicly
Merriam-Webster nicely summarizes the problem with this adverb: “Basically is a trickster: there is no word ‘basical,’ but to go from basic to basically we have to pretend like we believe there is.” For most adverbs, we can stick “-ly” on the end and be done with it (nice -> nicely; bad -> badly; aggressive -> aggressively). For “basic,” though, you have to add in that extra “al” before you’re ready for the “-ly” suffix.
Cemetery
Common misspellings: cemetary, cematery, cematary
Every other letter in “cemetery” is a vowel, and yet three of the four of those vowels are “e.” We naturally want to add some variety (especially since many people pronounce that second “e” with an “a” sound), but nope—”e”s all around.
Committee
Common misspellings: comittee, commitee
Now we’re back to the problem of double letters taking over words. “Committee” has not one, not two, but THREE sets of double letters. The audacity! Just like an actual committee that’s stacked full of people (and—let’s be honest—would probably function more efficiently with fewer members), the word fully believes the more, the merrier.
Consensus
Common misspelling: concensus
I have beef with this word. The meaning of the word is “general agreement” or unanimity. The word “census” means “a complete enumeration of a population.” So it really makes sense in my mind that “census” should be part of “consensus”…but instead it goes and changes that “c” to an “s.”
Definitely
Common misspellings: definitly, definately
Whenever I type or write this word, I still sound it out in my head, pronouncing the “finite” part in the middle like the word “finite” rather than how it sounds when I actually say “definitely” (my brain goes, “de-fi-ni-tely”). “Definitely” actually does follow some solid logic, though! It’s the adverb of the word “definite,” so you just add the “-ly” on to the end of that word. And it’s related to the word “finite” (there’s no such word as “finate”), so that’s how you can remember the double “i”s.
Embarrass
Common misspellings: embarass, emberrass
To avoid the feeling itself, make sure you spell “embarrass” with two “r”s, two “s”s, and only one “e.” The vowels in this word are tricky because, in many accents, the two “a”s have different sounds and the first one sounds a heck of a lot like the “e” at the beginning of the word.
Espresso
Common misspelling: expresso
Every barista in the world cringes inwardly when they hear someone order an “expresso.” In speech and spelling, that first syllable should be pronounced “es,” not “ex.” (Just listen to Sabrina Carpenter’s song whenever you need to remember how to pronounce it.)
Explanation
Common misspelling: explaination
Here are some variants of the word “explain”: “explain,” “explains,” “explained,” “explaining,” and…”explanation.” The noun form of that verb decided to ditch the “i” before the “n” (and the resulting hard “a” sound), maybe because a new hard “a” sound appeared (right before -tion), so two seemed excessive?
Extraordinary
Common misspelling: extrordinary
This misspelling has to do with pronunciation: Most people say “extrordinary” (not “extra-ordinary”), so it seems logical that the word should be spelled that way. However, the word tossed in an extra “a.” Just a few years ago, people started using the adjective “extra” to describe something or someone that’s over-the-top or dramatic; maybe it’s an abbreviation of the word “extraordinary,” which would make it easier to remember to toss in that “a”!
Foreign
Common misspelling: forein
Silent “g”s can creep up on you in so many English words! A few other words with silent “g”s to remember include the following: champagne, cologne, align, assign, benign, sign, feign, and reign.
Grammar
Common misspelling: grammer
Ironic, right? One of the most commonly misspelled words is “grammar” (but skip down about three sections to see an even more ironic one). This has to do with the first and second “a”s making different sounds from each other when we say the word out loud, so we automatically want that last syllable to be “-er” instead of “-ar.” However, I think the fact that this word is almost a palindrome symbolizes the beauty and order that grammar as a topic embodies. Of course, we had to throw in the lone “g” to mess it up and symbolize the chaos that frequently descends when you dive deep into the rules of English. It’s all about balance, really.
Immediately
Common misspellings: immediatly, imediately
Like “definitely,” “immediately” has the problem of people forgetting that last “e” before the “-ly” suffix. Just remember to spell out the whole root word—”immediate”—before you add on the adverb-forming “-ly.”
License
Common misspellings: lisense, lisence
This one gets me ALL THE TIME. It has the same problem as “absence” (two “s” sounds but using both “s” and “c”), but the placement of the “s” and “c” are swapped! Honestly, the only trick that has helped me remember their order is to remember that they’re in alphabetical order here (“c” before “s”).
Misspell
Common misspelling: mispell
See? I told you this was even more ironic than “grammar”! Yep—we frequently misspell “misspell.” What’s it doing with two “s”s anyway? But we really do need both: one “s” goes with the prefix “mis-,” while the other is for the root word “spell.”
Necessary
Common misspellings: nesessary, neccessary
What’s up with all these words using both “c”s and “s”s for “s” sounds? (The answer is that it usually has to do with the words’ etymologies, but we won’t get into that now.) This one is almost worse than “absence” and “license” because there’s even a double “s”!
Plagiarism and plagiarize
Common misspellings: plagarism, plagarize
That first “i” in “plagiarism” and “plagiarize” has no business being there. You’re trying to tell me “plagiar” rhymes with “pager” and we’re just going to be OK with tossing in an extra vowel? My (somewhat silly) trick to remember this one is to think that I need to keep an extra eye out for plagiarism, hence the extra “i” in the word.
Receive
Common misspelling: recieve
I think we’ve been burned too many times by the “i before e except after c” rule being wrong that we sometimes don’t believe it when it’s actually right. In this case, the “c” really does precede “ei” rather than “ie”!
Temperature
Common misspellings: temperture, temprature
I have to sound this word out in my head when I spell it, separating all the parts of the word (“tem-per-a-ture”). Some people pronounce it with a “per” sound in the middle (hence the misspelling “temperture”), and others use a “pra” sound (hence the misspelling “temprature”). The only way that almost no one seems to pronounce it—at least when they’re speaking quickly—is how it’s actually spelled, with a distinct “per” and “a.”
Tomorrow
Common misspelling: tommorrow
“Tomorrow” has eight letters but only five distinct letters. With three “o”s and two “r”s, the word tempts many people to toss an extra “m” in there too. However, you can think of the word as being a combination of “to-” and “morrow”: “morrow” (according to Merriam-Webster) is an old-fashioned word that means “the next day.” It’s not “mmorrow,” so we just need one “m” in “tomorrow.”
Vacuum
Common misspelling: vaccum
Merriam-Webster claims that 54 English words have “uu” in them, but it acknowledges that only two of those words are actually common: “vacuum” and “continuum.” (If you’re regularly using the word “duumvir” in your vocabulary, you and I need to talk). Because of the extreme rarity of this particular double vowel, it’s no wonder that people don’t expect it in the spelling of such a common household object’s name.
Vicious
Common misspelling: viscious
I’m always tempted to toss an extra “s” into “vicious,” but one way to remember that it’s just “vic” and not “visc” is to think that the word can be defined as “full of vice.” “Vice” has no “s,” so neither does that first syllable in “vicious.”
Wednesday
Common misspellings: wensday, wendsday
Wednesday has serious middle-child vibes to me. When saying it out loud, we skip through it and shorten it to “wens-day,” but don’t forget about all those extra letters! This is another one that I automatically sound out every time I type it: “wed-nes-day.”
Zucchini
Common misspellings: zuchini, zukini
How many letters does it take to make a “k” sound? In Zucchini, it’s apparently three. The double “c”s come from the Italian language, and the “h” decided to tag along as well.
Which of these words do you struggle with the most? Let me know in the comments, and if there’s any other grammar question that keeps you up at night, I’d love to hear about it so I can research and write a post about it!
Sources:
- Kelley, Shannon. “Spelling Irregular Words: An Evidence-Based Literacy Strategy.” Understood. Accessed August 15, 2024. https://www.understood.org/en/articles/evidence-based-literacy-strategy-spelling-irregular-words.
- Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. 14th ed. Taunton, MA: QuadGraphics, 2016.
- “OUP Companion Web Site:Common Spelling Errors.” Oxford University Press. Accessed August 15, 2024. https://global.oup.com/booksites/content/0199296251/essentials/commonspellingerrors/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template.