For me common spelling mistakes include confusing some of these word pairs.
- loose vs. lose
- then vs. than
- were vs. where
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For some reason unfortunately gave me trouble until I broke it down and remembered to have tuna in there lol
So I just think: unfor tuna tely
unfor🐟tely
I will cry if this becomes the evolution of emoji usage lol
Think of all of the interesting things you can do with regional dialects!
We have kids saying U R . Emoji taking the place of words is just natural devolution.
Travelling vs traveling
The former is British, the latter is American. Noah Webster eliminated letter doubles in words where he thought the extra one didn’t add anything useful. Another word that did the same thing is “level(l)ing”.
Interesting, so I could make the argument that I was right all along
Nice try, FBI stylometric profiler.
you got me. But fuck I revealed my own spelling mistakes. Find me!
Can’t recall them, but there are some words in which I keep typing double letters even though they aren’t supposed to be there.
Licence / license, and practice / practise. I have to look them up every single time because I forget which of each is the noun and which is the verb, and even then, there are situations where using the noun as a verb might actually be the right thing to do and I hate the whole thing. So I probably still get those wrong whenever I use them.
Barring brain farts (increasingly common) and muscle memory leading me astray on the keyboard, my spelling is otherwise fairly good, but those pairings I could do without.
Regarding license and licence, in American English it’s just always license. So when in doubt pick that and claim to be an expat lol.
I can never figure out where that pesky u goes in restaurant. (Thank goodness for autocorrect, or I couldn’t have spelled it for this post!)
“effecient” instead of “efficient”. The funny thing is as I get older I find myself typing homonyms of words instead of the word I meant. My fingers are barely listening to my brain lol
More a typo than a spelling mistake but if a word ends in ‘th’, my brain cannot stop adding an ‘e’.
- withe
- bothe
- mythe
So you’re just a time traveler from the 1200s. NBD.
It’s only very recently that I learned I’ve been using the wrong then/than and effect/affect most of the time.
What kinda helped me was thinking of then as relative to time and than was associated with math so it helped recognize how it related to concepts differently lol
Effect I just think of “special effects” and so I know the other is the one related to an impact.
- “When?” > “Then!”
- Rather than the alternative
- Cause and effect
- When deciding which to use for a verb:
- Effect causes an entire result; “A discarded cigarette effected the forest fire”
- Affect alters part of the result; “Human behaviors affect climate change.”
- When deciding which to use for a verb:
- “When?” > “Then!”
Australian English is based off British English but is not identical. Both are different to US English and have a lot of words that are spelled with a bit more historical contingency. That said, knowing which words have which version of suffix can be difficult.
For example, authorise or authorize. Practice or practise. Gaol or jail. English is a pain but it does make a good common language.
At this point I just accept the various spellings as common. I feel like I stick to one particular style but I honestly couldn’t tell you if certain words are UK English, US English, or specific to somewhere else.
As long as meaning is clear, I don’t think it matters which is used. Alternate vocabulary is probably more significant points of confusion (e.g. what is a biscuit to you?)
Yeah, and also the Oxford comma is in my mind much clearer. I think if you are understood you are using the language correctly. If you are not understood at first but become understood after a bit of back and forth then you are using the language and also pushing the limits a little, making changes along the way. It is an evolutionary process, not design, so it is messy.
I fuck up “insure/ensure” and “effect/affect” a lot.
Misspellings effect a terrible affect from pedants.
“effect/affect”
There are three meanings to each. Good luck.
One thing I’m realizing more and more as I type in a game in PC is that I’m only good at spelling the first half of words. I’ve gotten used to auto correct on phones and spell check in other programs. My errors are typically on the end.
Necessary and apparently are two common words I get wrong fairly often.
Diahhrheoea
Or whatever it is.
In english a lot. Not just because i am dislexic, but also french stemming words are a nightmare
“Litterly” is one i have still no idea how to spell. Or wether, not meaning the weather as in sun and run but the one for implying choice
Literally and whether.
Viscous vs vicious.
It’s a viscous cycle.
A vicious liquid!
I used to do this with nauseous versus noxious.
Sounds like a sticky situation.
Or slippery situation, depends on how viscous.
