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spelling error

Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, even learned people spelled with extreme (or extream, or extreem) inconsistency. Modern rules of English spelling are often difficult to learn and apply because they reflect the complex linguistic heritage of English and its tendency to absorb new words from other languages.

Readers may form an opinion of you based on your attention to detail. Spelling errors can make you seem careless, clumsy, or ignorant. When you are not sure how to spell a word, look it up. If you write with a word processor, use a spell-checker on your final draft to catch any misspellings you may have missed in proofreading, and remember that spell-checkers will not catch errors that arise from your mistaking a word for its homonym. Keep a list of words you continually misspell--doing so may help you break the habit. In particular, watch out for these three classes of words:

• words constantly misspelled, usually words with double consonants or other unusual forms: for example, "accommodate," "embarrass," "occurred," "neither," "receive" (these are the correct spellings).
• words derived from Latin or Greek, often misspelled in the plural or mistaken for singular: e.g. data (the datum is, the data are), medium (the medium is, the media are), phenomenon (the phenomenon is, the phenomena are), criterion (the criterion is, the criteria are).
• common phrases mistaken for single words, or vice versa: for instance, a lot, each other, cannot, everyday, and all right. Never write "I can not understand why we see eachother alot more than most people." Only write "everyday" if you mean to use the adjective (meaning ordinary) not the adverbial phrase (once every twenty-four hours). While you might use the expression "alright" when quoting colloquial speech, the phrase "all right" is the preferred written form.

Copyright 1996 Yale University. Revised on Monday, May 20, 1996