Spelling

Commonly Misspelled Words

198 words that people misspell often enough to search for the wrong spelling, grouped by the mistake. Each one links to a page with the right spelling, what goes wrong, how often it happens and a way to remember it.

The words most often written wrong

How many times the misspelling appears in web text for every 1,000 correct spellings.

CorrectMisspellingWrong per 1,000
ACCOMMODATIONSACCOMODATIONS118
NOTICEABLENOTICABLE112
DEFINITELYDEFINATELY109
ROOMMATESROOMATES102
TARIFFSTARIFS98
ROOMMATEROOMATE91
ACCOMMODATEACCOMODATE89
OCCURRENCESOCCURENCES82
PAVILIONPAVILLION79
WITHDRAWALWITHDRAWL78
TIRESTURES72
OCCURRINGOCCURING71

I before E, or E before I

IE and EI sound alike in many words, so the order has to be remembered rather than heard.

One letter where there should be two

Double letters are not heard when the word is said, so it is easy to write only one. The doubling usually comes from how the word was built: a prefix that ends in the same letter as the root (ac + commodate), or a final consonant doubled before an ending (begin, beginning).

Two letters where there should be one

After seeing many words with doubled letters, it is natural to double one that should stay single, especially before an ending.

The wrong vowel

In an unstressed syllable, A, E, I and O all sound like a quick "uh", so the ear cannot tell which one is written.

A letter left out

Some letters are barely said, or not said at all, in everyday speech (the N in government, the P in pumpkin), so they drop out when the word is written as it sounds.

An extra letter

An extra vowel often creeps in where a word gains an ending (true becomes truly, not truely) or where the spoken word seems to need one.

Letters in the wrong order

Two letters next to each other, often a vowel pair, are easy to swap when writing fast, and the result can still look right.

Letters that sound alike

Some letters make the same sound (C and S, C and K, G and J), so a word can be written the way it sounds and still be wrong.

How we chose these words

We started from Peter Norvig's counts of the words on the web, where misspellings show up next to the real words, and kept the forms that are one letter away from a common English word, are in no dictionary we use, and appear far less often than the real word. We then kept only the misspellings that people type into Google often enough to measure, and only where Google itself corrects them to that word.