For me common spelling mistakes include confusing some of these word pairs.
- loose vs. lose
- then vs. than
- were vs. where
Their vs there vs they’re.
I know the difference but my fingers clearly do not.
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.
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!)
I fuck up “insure/ensure” and “effect/affect” a lot.
Viscous vs vicious.
It’s a viscous cycle.
A vicious liquid!
ageing vs aging
The former is the way I learned it in school way back in the 70’s… Apparently that is the way the British spell it and it sends US citizens into an aneurysm.
One that bothers me the most when people do it is brake vs break. Your car will break if you do not apply the brake in a timely fashion.
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!
“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
Pronounce and pronunciation seem like they should have the same root, but one of them has an extra ‘o’ for some perfectly logical reason. I know the difference and don’t consistently misspell it, but if I edit a sentence to switch from one to the other without noticing that it’s a danger inflection …
Also maintain vs. maintenance for the same reason.
I habitually throw random spelling and grammatical mistakes into my posts and comments all the time, to make it less likely that anyone can fingerprint my writing style and thereby dox me. That is the only reason for any such errors.
I always ALWAYS have to check separate / separation / separator. I want to put a third e in there so much.
uhm … separate is an adjective and separation is a noun I guess?
I think they were referring more to a tendency of writing seperat(e, ion, or).
Unfortunately the classification of single words is not so cut and dry:
- The separator machine uses separation algorithms to separate separate appropriately.
- separator is an adjective
- separation is an adjective
- 1st separate is a verb
- 2nd separate is a noun
- The separator machine uses separation algorithms to separate separate appropriately.
So few comments… Yet mine is already taken. I get this wrong constantly too.
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 used to have trouble with necessary. I have pages of notes with neccesary/neseccary/necesary/necessary scribbled in the margins to see which one looked right.
- Guarantee
- it(')s
For the pairs you mentioned this might help:
- “loose” is a loose word, it’s extra “o” makes it lanky, but “lose” lost an “o”
- “then” is a reply to “when” and is spelt similarly rather “than” the comparison word
- “where” is a question answered by “here;” “was” has no “h” and neither does “were”
It’s and its annoy me because they both make sense for possessive. The only thing that really made me feel better is thinking of it’s like his and hers. His and hers doesn’t have an apostrophe.
thank you for the tips!
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.