Did you notice the one in the title? Felt good to find it, didn’t it?

Typos or spelling mistakes?
Sometimes you’ve only made a typo, as opposed to a true mistake. What’s the difference? Typo means typographical error. Like when your fingers hit the keys faster than your brain fires synapses.

Here’s an example. Many English words end with the letters ‘i-n-g’. So sometimes we add a ‘g’ to words that end in ‘i-n’. ‘Dolphin’ becomes ‘dolphing’. Our muscle memory is powerful. It’s sheer habit. Not really a mistake, right?

There’s also the cognate problem. Words that sound alike but are spelled differently. Those are also not true spelling mistakes, but rather word choice mistakes. For example, ‘You think it’s right, but it’s not.’ That sentence is perfect. But  ‘You think its write, but its knot’ is, well, not.

A true spelling mistake is, for example, ‘consistant’ versus ‘consistent’. The first one is just wrong.

Here are some more, and some explanations for why they’re so common.

They’re English but not English
Several words that top the list are masquerading as English. They’re actually borrowed from other languages. Maybe that’s why spelling them wrong can feel so right. Four of the top candidates are French.

• Amateur…  not ‘amature’
• Liaison…  don’t forget that second ‘i’
• Maneuver… that’s the American spelling; it’s ‘manoeuvre’ in the UK
• Questionnaire… two ‘n’s and a final ‘e’

Those pesky double letters
Bookkeeper is a great word. Three double letters in a row. But it’s not that common a word, so it doesn’t make yourdictionary.com’s  list of top spelling mistakes. These do:

• Accommodate
• Committed
• Embarrass
• Harass
• Millennium
• Occasionally
• Occurrence
• Referred (not to be confused with ‘refereed’)
• Tyranny

Some words have more dubble letters than people remember. Some have fewer. No rules here, so you need a good memory, and a good spell checker.

What you say is not what you see
Hard to say whether the pronounciations are wrong or the spellings are just ancient, but here are a few:

• Miniature… did you pronounce the ‘a’?
• Acceptable … did you say ‘uh-bl’ or ‘i-bl’?
• Privilege… that unspoken ‘i’ again!

For once, Google is not the answer
Google the word ‘consistant’ and you’ll see there are nearly 5,500,000 hits. So it must be spelled right, right? Wrong. The hits are preceded by a question: “Did you mean ‘consistent’?” Oh, so it ends with ‘e-n-t’, not ‘a-n-t’. The very first hit is spot on. It names ‘consistant’ as a common misspelling of ‘consistent’. The other 5,499,999 some-odd hits are for the correctly spelled word.

The lesson? Don’t use the number of Google hits as a spell-check tool.

Spelling mistakes can cost you a lot
Some peeple just love to spot misspellings. It’s a cheap way to feel smarter than the next guy. That’s fine, if the next guy is your brother, for example. It’s not fine if it’s the IT or pharma or finance or legal or basically any other company you might hire. Your whole corporate image can be at risk if your public face is wearing sloppy spelling.

Spot the bloopers
We made some misspellings on purpose in this article (not counting the one in the title or the ones used as examples). Can you spot them?

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