A study of the 20 most common spelling errors made by the British reveals that mixing up vowels leads to many of them. Contributing factors are said to be spell checkers, predictive texting and laziness.
“And he respects Owl, because you can't help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn't spell it right; but spelling isn't everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn't count.” From The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne, 1928.
Milne is still widely read today because of his knack of creating almost believable make-believe worlds for both children and adults alike. Unfortunately for us mere real-world mortals however there are no days off for our spelling ability and you need only ask a journalist or blogger to know how sharp is the eagle eye of those people who are only too ready to gleefully point out – and not without a certain malice – our errors.
A recent survey by online survey company OnePoll.com asked 3,500 people to submit their most common errors and The Telegraph has published the top twenty culprits.
One word which definitely causes lots of problems is ‘definitely’, which contains many traps for the unwary including mixing up the second ‘I’ with ‘A’ and leaving out the final ‘E’. That word came second.
In third place came ‘manoeuvre’, with its diabolical combination of 'OE' and' U'. Americans don’t have that problem of course, preferring as they do the more manageable ‘maneuver’. ‘Embarrass’ came in an honorable fourth thanks to its uncanny habit of mysteriously losing either an 'R' or an 'S' (but surely not both?) on its way to completion.
Below is the complete Top 20 list of errors, at the top of which you will see that the champion is the ever-problematic-yet-seemingly-so-simple ‘seperate’. Sorry, my spell checker just reminded me that I should have typed ‘separate’.
1. Separate 2. Definitely 3. Manoeuvre 4. Embarrass 5. Occurrence 6. Consensus 7. Unnecessary 8. Acceptable 9. Broccoli 10. Referred 11. Bureaucracy 12. Supersede 13. Questionnaire 14. Connoisseur 15. A lot 16. Entrepreneur 17. Particularly 18. Liquify 19. Conscience 20. Parallel
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