Friday, June 19, 2009

Most commonly misspelt words

As spellings go, it definitely shouldn't be one of the trickier ones to remember. But "definitely" is the most commonly misspelt word in the English language, according to a study released yesterday, with flummoxed people regularly writing it as "definately".

And although some - wrongly - may call it sacreligious and a shocking inditement on our school system, "sacrilegious" and "indict" are not far behind in the list of words we have trouble spelling, The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK reported.

Six out of 10 people polled in the UK said they were embarrassed by their poor spelling skills, yet the research also found 57 per cent judge other people on their spelling, with 42 per cent admitting they believe people who can’t spell are "thick".

Worryingly, although the words failed to make even the Top 20, 9 per cent thought "mortgage" was spelt "morgauge" and 7 per cent often spell "speech" as "speach".

The Top 10 most commonly misspelt words in the study by http://www.onepoll.com/ were:
1 Definitely (Definately);
2 Sacrilegious (Sacreligious);
3 Indict (Indite);
4 Manoeuvre (Maneouvre);
5 Bureaucracy ( Beaurocracy);
6 Broccoli (Brocolli);
7 Phlegm (Phleghm);
8 Prejudice ( Predjudice);
9 Consensus (Conscensus);
10 Unnecessary (Unecessary).

From: Courier Mail

Photo: "Could you ...." by weare1

2 comments:

Sammi said...

That makes me feel so stupid:
At first I couldn't figure out which was the misspelled word.

pita-woman said...

I'm guilty as charged on "definitely". I try to use spell check, but occasionally forget, but at times, it doesn't catch the mistakes.

I had to get the dictionary out on #4... lol, I guess that's the Aussie version, as the American version is: maneuver