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Apparently I subscribe to Quora. I don’t know when my subscription began. Mostly, the posts are the sort of trivia I indulge in only when desperate for work avoidance. But the question, “What is the most misspelt word in the English language?” got my attention. Of course, the first response worried the difference between misspelt and misspelled, but then we were off and running.
Spelling, of course, is a convention to which we cling more fiercely when we have dictionaries at the ready. Before Samuel Johnson came around, people paid little attention. Just think of all the spelling bees they missed out on in the 15th century. But here we are, creatures of our time, and certain misspellings tend to irk most of us, even those who call themselves poor spellers.
Still, there’s a difference, I think, between misspelling and misuse, as there’s a difference between misspelling and improper use of punctuation. I prefer to eliminate the many candidates for the honor of most misspelt word that rely on the misplaced apostrophe (e.g., its/it’s). I’ll also eliminate what I call the genuine malaprop, where the misused word is not well understood in its standard sense (e.g., effect/affect, further/farther). Quora readers offered quite a few examples that misspelled by way of an added or closed space (may be rather than maybe, alot rather than a lot), and for my own persnickety reasons I took them out of the running. I also couldn’t quite go for those made-up words that add an unnecessary prefix or suffix, like irregardless. I’m leaving off proper-name misspellings, like Carribean. Finally, typos like teh don’t make my cut.
But quite a few candidates remain. I’ve divided these into two categories: the misspellings that might have arrived on the page by way of an overcompensating spell checker, and misspellings that don’t exist currently in the dictionary. So I think we can award two winners. Since hundreds of us are now reading over final papers from the semester, I suspect we’ll arrive at some sort of consensus. Judging from the Quora submissions, I’ve anointed two lists of finalists, in alphabetical order:
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Remember, we are looking not for the most egregious misspelling, or the one that bothers you the most, but for the most common misspelling in each category. Why do you see the ones you choose so much more often than others? Is it the double consonant or vowel? The peculiarity of the conventional spelling? A question of pronunciation? Hypercorrection? Or just the common occurrence of the word itself (in which case, why do people misspell it so much)?
Finally, do you suspect that these two most common misspellings, whichever they are, will eventually morph into acceptable alternate spellings, like amok/amuck or barbecue/barbeque? Take a moment of work avoidance from those papers and cast your vote!
