Google has created a fascinating graphic of America’s top misspellings by analysing what people in each state type into its search engine. In Louisiana and Oregon, for instance, most people are unable to spell ‘definitely’, while in California they struggle with ‘desert’. In New York and Colorado people have difficulties spelling ‘beautiful’, in Florida ‘tomorrow’ proves problematic and in Washington, North Carolina and Missouri ‘pneumonia’ is most commonly misspelt. Pity the poor population of Massachusetts though – their most troublesome spelling is the name of their own state!
Of course, we would consider several of the ‘correct’ American spellings wrong – ‘neighbor’ (neighbour) and ‘diarrhea’ (diarrhoea) for instance.
That got me thinking about the most common misspellings in our own country. Handily, the Oxford English Corpus – an electronic collection of over two billion words that shows how people are using the language – has compiled a list of the most common spelling mistakes. In case you have a blindspot when it comes to spelling, I share them below as a reference guide and hope you find them helpful:
Correct spelling |
Common misspelling |
| Accommodate, accommodation | accomodate, accomodation |
| Achieve | acheive |
| Across | accross |
| Aggressive, aggression | agressive, agression |
| Apparently | apparantly |
| Appearance | appearence |
| Argument | arguement |
| Assassination | assasination |
| Basically | basicly |
| Beginning | begining |
| Believe | beleive, belive |
| Bizarre | bizzare |
| Business | buisness |
| Calendar | calender |
| Caribbean | Carribean |
| Cemetery | cemetary |
| Chauffeur | chauffer |
| Colleague | collegue |
| Coming | comming |
| Committee | commitee |
| Completely | completly |
| Conscious | concious |
| Curiosity | curiousity |
| Definitely | definately |
| Dilemma | dilemna |
| Disappear | dissapear |
| Disappoint | dissapoint |
| Ecstasy | ecstacy |
| Embarrass | embarass |
| Environment | enviroment |
| Existence | existance |
| Fahrenheit | farenheit |
| Familiar | familar |
| Finally | finaly |
| Fluorescent | florescent or floresant |
| Foreign | foriegn |
| Foreseeable | forseeable |
| Forty | fourty |
| Forward | foward |
| Friend | freind |
| Further | futher |
| Gist | jist |
| Glamorous | glamourous |
| Government | goverment |
| Guard | gaurd |
| Happened | happend or happenned |
| Harass, harassment | harrass or harrassment |
| Honorary | honourary |
| Humorous | humourous |
| Idiosyncrasy | idiosyncracy |
| Immediately | immediatly |
| Incidentally | incidently |
| Independent | independant |
| Interrupt | interupt |
| Irresistible | irresistable |
| Knowledge | knowlege |
| Liaise, liaison | liase, liason |
| Lollipop | lollypop or lolipop |
| Millennium, millennia | millenium, millenia |
| Neanderthal | neandertal |
| Necessary | neccessary |
| Noticeable | noticable |
| Occasion | ocassion or occassion |
| Occurred, occurring | occured, occuring |
| Occurence | occurance or occurence |
| Pavilion | pavillion |
| Persistent | persistant |
| Pharaoh | pharoah |
| Piece | peice |
| Politician | politican |
| Portuguese | Portugese |
| Possession | posession |
| Preferred, preferring | prefered, prefering |
| Propaganda | propoganda |
| Publicly | publically (or amusingly, pubically) |
| Really | realy |
| Receive | recieve |
| Referred, referring | refered, refering |
| Religious | religous |
| Remember | remeber |
| Resistance | resistence |
| Sense | sence |
| Separate | seperate |
| Siege | seige |
| Successful | succesful, sucessful or sucessfull |
| Supersede | supercede |
| Surprise | suprise |
| Tattoo | tatoo |
| Tendency | tendancy |
| Therefore | therefor |
| Threshold | threshhold |
| Tomorrow | tommorow, tommorrow |
| Tongue | tounge |
| Truly | truely |
| Unforeseen | unforseen |
| Unfortunately | unfortunatly |
| Until | untill |
| Weird | wierd |
| Wherever | whereever |
| Which | wich |
