30 Commonly Misspelled Words Explained
Nowadays, everyone seems to be complaining about certain words being misspelled. Truth be told, we’ve seen quite a lot of these mistakes lately. Some words are clearly being incorrectly written in a consistent manner. Moreover teachers support our findings. Every single teacher we talked to said that there are some words that students most often misspell. And truth be told, not just students. We’ve seen these words misspelled by PhD graduates, engineers, architects, doctors, etc. However, these people don’t get penalized by anyone for misspelling a word or two here and there. With students, things are completely different.
And you know what? These mistakes are costing students like you valuable points on their essays and on their homework. To make sure you don’t make these mistakes yourself, take a look at our list of the 30 most commonly misspelled words further down the page. However, there is one more thing you need to keep in mind. Some of these most misspelled words are not caught by spelling software. Not even the spell check in Microsoft Word can catch some of these errors. Why? Because you may use a correctly-written word that is very similar to the word you should be using. The spell checker software sees this as a correct word, but doesn’t know that it has a completely different meaning.
The problem with commonly misspelled words
The problem with commonly misspelled words is that you may not even notice the mistake. It’s not that you don’t know how to write correctly. We’ve seen these mistakes being made by students who are in the top 3 of their class. We’ve even seen teachers make some of these mistakes. The problem is that in some cases, you don’t realize that the word is misspelled. When you look at the word, your brain makes the correct association, even though the word is not written correctly. This is why it’s so easy to overlook these small mistakes.
Many of the commonly misspelled words are very similar to other words. If you are a foreign student and your native language is not English, you won’t notice the mistakes. Is it spelt or spelled? See what we mean? Don’t worry about it though. Most American college students make these same mistakes. And did you know that most students don’t make mistakes when they have some of the hardest words to spell? They make the errors with simple, trivial words.
The importance of correct spelling of words
Spelling words, including weird English words, correctly is extremely important. You may not realize it, but your teachers are paying very close attention to the way you spell. Yes, they are also very interested in your logic and ideas. They are very attentive to the way you express yourself. However, the first thing they look at is your spelling. After all, this is something you should know how to do properly by now, in their opinion.
And it’s not just teachers who are looking at the correct spelling of words. When you will apply to a university or college, your will have to write an admission essay. This will be reviewed by an admission committee. Guess what they look at first! Yes, your spelling! You can write an exceptional essay just to have it rejected because of those hard words that you’ve misspelled.
The list of 30 most commonly misspelled words
Without further ado, here is our selection of the top 30 most misspelled English words, along with their correct spelling:
Words starting with letter A
- accomodate, accomodation (should be accommodate, accommodation)
- agressive, agression (should be aggressive, aggression)
- assasination (should be assassination)
Words starting with letter B
- begining (should be beginning)
- bizzare (should be bizarre)
- beautifull (should be beautiful)
Words starting with letter C
- calibur (should be caliber)
- calous (should be callous)
- cancelation (should be cancellation)
Words starting with letter D
- debateable (should be debatable)
- dammage (should be damage)
- decrepid (should be decrepit)
Words starting with letter E
- effecient (should be efficient)
- eligable (should be eligible)
- embeded (should be embedded)
Words starting with letter F
- facillity (should be facility)
- fairwell (should be farewell)
- feromone (should be pheromone)
Words starting with letter G
- ganster (should be gangster)
- gauranteed (should be guaranteed)
- German Sheperd (should be German Shepherd)
Words starting with letter L
- lable (should be label)
- lanscape (should be landscape)
- leafs (should be leaves)
Words starting with letter O
- obervation (should be observation)
- ocasionally (should be occasionally)
- occassionaly (should be occasionally)
Words starting with letter R
- readly (should be readily)
- receeding (should be receding)
- recomendation (should be recommendation)
How to easily identify misspelled words
Nowadays, it’s pretty easy to identify misspelled words. Not only do you now have the list of 30 commonly misspelled words, you also have a lot of other tools at your disposal. Did you know that you can google words? Google will show you the correct spelling as a suggestion at the top of the search results page, in case the word is spelled wrong. Yes, it’s that easy to catch the mistake! And let’s not even talk about word processing software that almost always contains a spell checker.
Microsoft Word is perfectly capable of underlining – in RED – all the misspelled words. When it comes to Microsoft Word, it will identify everything, even hard words to spell. All you have to do is right-click the highlighted word and choose the correct form from the list of suggestions. Misspelling words when writing in Microsoft Word is almost impossible. However, there are some things that Word can miss. Some of the entries on the commonly misspelled words are actual words. They look very similar to others, but their meaning is completely different. Depending on situation, Microsoft Word may not detect these errors.
Finally, it would have been interesting to have a list of the most misspelled words by state, but we don’t. This is why we can only recommend you to proofread everything you write carefully. You might be surprised by what you find. To get rid of annoying typos, we advise you to use the following homework apps. They will surely make your assignment writing easier.
