Spelling
Occured or occurred?
Occurred is the right spelling. Occured is a common misspelling of it.
OCCURED has one R where OCCURRED has two.
Why people write OCCURED
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).
Occur + R + ed: double the R, because the stress is on -CUR.
How often OCCURRED is misspelled
In the web pages Google counted for its trillion-word corpus (Peter Norvig's word counts), OCCURED appears 63 times for every 1,000 OCCURRED, about once for every 16 correct uses.
Is OCCURED a word?
No. OCCURED is not in NWL2023, Collins Scrabble Words or ENABLE, the word lists Scrabble and other word games use, so no word game accepts it. OCCURRED is in all three and scores 13 points in Scrabble before bonus squares.
What occurred means
verb: To take place.
For example: "It occurred to me that we should hire another secretary"
More words with the same mistake
One letter where there should be two:
More spelling help
Commonly misspelled words, grouped by the mistake · Free printables and word games for teachers · Unscramble any letters