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Commonly Misspelled Words


avident

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Let your anger out here and make that difference you so strongly yearn for. We all misspell some words, so it's good for us (bearing in mind our English marks) to finally learn to spell them correctly. And if anyone writes the words previously corrected wrong ever again under this topic, that someone is a dead man. Haha!

Allow me to start:

Definitely. No, not deffanetly nor deffinately, nor defanitely nor any of the million other variations out there - just simply definitely. It's so widely used everyone should learn to spell it correctly, don't you agree? ''Definitely'', you should answer.

Your turn. Go ahead, viva la language revolucion!

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Excited. It's not spelt 'exited'. 'I'm so exited' means what exactly? That you want to leave?

People who mix 'your' and 'you're' up. Basic grammar goes a long way.

I always spell 'surprise' and 'separate' wrong btw. 'Suprise' and 'seperate' don't exist.

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Existence is my primary annoyance. There is no a in it!

Also exercise (my French teacher couldn't find this in the dictionary; it took me a while to figure out she was looking at "excercise" instead), perceive (I spent ages in an English mock last year trying to figure out what order the e and the i are in!), effect vs. affect, ect for etc. Et cetera.

Also, when people write "and etc." drives me up the wall: ARGH tautologies, redundancies and pleonasms!

Edited by Hyperbole
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Then and than. I die a little when someone writes "A is better then B".

Than is the comparison word

Then means 'subsequently', as in 'I had breakfast then I went to school'.

My bloody NAME! It's four letters, it's really not that hard. What happened to 'i before e except after c'? They spelt it wrong on my freaking Student ID card and I had to go ask for it changed when clearly it was spelt right on the student database.

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Then and than. I die a little when someone writes "A is better then B".

Than is the comparison word

Then means 'subsequently', as in 'I had breakfast then I went to school'.

My bloody NAME! It's four letters, it's really not that hard. What happened to 'i before e except after c'? They spelt it wrong on my freaking Student ID card and I had to go ask for it changed when clearly it was spelt right on the student database.

SAME HERE.

ugh.

its soooooo annoying! and my name is the easiest thing ever: Emilie

okay if you spell it Emily, thats understandable....but PLEASE when people come up with things like Emellie or Emmaly its gets frustrating.

Its one of the easiest names out there!!!

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Do proper nous count as 'commonly misspelled words', or are we making a generalization here based on personal experience. Sure, names in general probably get misspelled pretty often, but one person's name is probably not misspelled as often as some of these. One thing that really annoys me is the use of the double superlative ie/ more better or bestest (unless someone is trying to be cute...or that someone is a cat). It's not even the irregular ones like 'good'...but it's the simple ones too that people screw up on, like more faster. When you grow up with English as your first language, you should NOT be making these mistakes.

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Do proper nous count as 'commonly misspelled words', or are we making a generalization here based on personal experience. Sure, names in general probably get misspelled pretty often, but one person's name is probably not misspelled as often as some of these. One thing that really annoys me is the use of the double superlative ie/ more better or bestest (unless someone is trying to be cute...or that someone is a cat). It's not even the irregular ones like 'good'...but it's the simple ones too that people screw up on, like more faster. When you grow up with English as your first language, you should NOT be making these mistakes.

I've said 'more stupider' before... :)

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Receive...its funny..i used to NEVER spell it correctly.:)

Weird: same

exercise: always see it as excercise XD

and yeah the of and have thingie: would HAVE.XD lol..you're right there.

oh my god, expect have always spelt it excpect and seen people spell it that way XD

Edited by Ruan Chun Xian
*receive, Maha, not recieve.*
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I can't take this new fad where the phrase ''All right'' is shortened into the form ''Alright''. I guess it's accepted in spoken language, but I've noticed many have started to use it in proper writing, as well. Saw it on MTV the other day, sigh.

Another thing I saw on MTV, was that they wrote ''for awhile'' instead of the correct ''for a while''. Yes, it's allowed to write awhile as one word, but only if it's not the object of a preposition such as ''for''.

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I can't take this new fad where the phrase ''All right'' is shortened into the form ''Alright''. I guess it's accepted in spoken language, but I've noticed many have started to use it in proper writing, as well. Saw it on MTV the other day, sigh.

Another thing I saw on MTV, was that they wrote ''for awhile'' instead of the correct ''for a while''. Yes, it's allowed to write awhile as one word, but only if it's not the object of a preposition such as ''for''.

Word on "all right"! So much. But "awhile" is an adverb, whereas "while" is a noun. So there are very specific cases where you use either; it's not as bendable as you describe it.

Practise/Practice - drives me mad!!!

In British English "practise" with an s is simply the verb form, while "practice" with a c is the noun. So unless people are missing that point, it's not much to be annoyed about? (Personally, I find it more annoying that American English uses only the c version.)

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Hyperbole, what do you mean? A while is a noun and means a short time. So if you have for or only before a while, you should use this version as it would then be ''for a short time'' or ''only a short time.'' Awhile, on the other hand, is an adverb meaning for a short time and thus you could not use it after prepositions as that would create an incorrect sentence such as ''for for a short time.'' Instead, you would need to use for example the phrase ''I slept awhile longer.''

So:

I slept for a while longer.

I slept awhile longer.

I rest my case.

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