If you have ever picked up a dictionary of the English language and are aware of the Spelling Bee competition, you know that spelling is hard. According to Handy, misspellings are innocent and a way to correct yourself while you are in school. However, it can create embarrassing situations in professional settings. If you receive an official document with misspelling, you develop trust issues and the same is repeated when someone else receives a professional or official document with misspellings from you. Here are some of the most misspelled words you need to be careful about:
The Words
- Which – Among all the other words in the English language, the word “which” has the most numerous mentions in the Oxford Dictionary. It is also pretty easy to type down “wich” when you really meant “which”. Check out your document carefully for this common error and make sure you have spelled the word as “which” unless it’s in the suffix as “sandwich”.
- Accommodate – This word doesn’t really come up as many times in your daily routine as it does in professional documents and business communication. You want to get this right every time and make sure that the count of c’s and m’s are both twice in the word. The correct spelling is “Accommodate”.
- Receive – If reading this spelling made your senses twitch just a bit then you probably spell it correctly. However, the pronunciation of the word has made spelling victims out of many. To not fall into that trap, you need to remember the elementary school lesson that has such frequent use in everyday life for English speakers. “I before e, except after c”. Apply that rule and the correct spelling is “receive”.
- Occurred – Like accommodate, this word also has a confusing combination of consonants. Moreover, the use of double ‘r’ may confuse you about its tense. Welcome to the splendid confusion that comes with the English language. Similar to accommodate, this one is also spelled with two c’s and r’s. The correct spelling is “occurred”.
- Until – If you think the correct spelling has double ‘ll’ then you are either wrong or a time traveler from the Middle Ages. That was the correct spelling of the word during those times. However, since we have progressed far enough since then, the word has just a single boring ‘l’ in the current timeline. The correct spelling is “until”.
- Liaison – Unfortunately, this innocent word has tripped up everyone with a similarly innocent vowel ‘i’. It has earned the top score in the game “Spell It”, by Merriam-Webster for being one of the most commonly misspelled words. Ginger, the grammar app also found out that most users mess up the word due to that pesky second ‘i’. The correct spelling for this one is “liaison”.
Conclusion
Handy suggests that since English isn’t a phonetic language, we should always be careful with these misspelled words and use them correctly a few times to retain the correct spelling. Otherwise, even the word “misspell” can get you in a lot of trouble.
