PublicWongery:Frequently misspelled words

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This is a list of some words the Grandmasters have frequently seen misspelled, and which they would prefer not to see misspelled again. Please do not misspell these words in your articles in the Public Wongery (or in a Private Wongery, for that matter, if you happen to be a Master Wonger). If you do, the Grandmasters will be annoyed.

(There is, of course, the possibility that because of frequent usage some of these "misspellings" will over time come to be considered perfectly acceptable. Arguably, in some of these cases this is already happening, or has already happened. We do not consider that our problem. As far as the Wongery is concerned, they remain misspellings.)

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of every common misspelling, just the ones that occurred to the Grandmasters offhand. This list may be added to over time.

  • Acquire, not aquire.
  • Apocalypse. Not apocolypse, not apacalipse or whatever other creative ways someone might decide to spell it.
  • Appalling. Two P's, two L's.
  • Aquatic, not acquatic. (Possibly this mistake comes about through confusion with acquire, above.)
  • Arctic, not artic. Also, Antarctic, not Antartic.
  • Awkward is an awkward word. Spelled awkwardly. Like that. "Awkward". Which is.
  • Bizarre, not bizzare.
  • Cemetery. Not cemetary, or cematery, or cematary. Three es, no as.
  • Cojones, not cajones, assuming you intend to refer to testicles and not to large boxes. (Though really, I'm not sure why you should be referring to testicles in such a manner in a Wongery article anyway.)
  • Coming, not comming.
  • Curiosity. Not curiousity. Yes, the adjective is spelled -ous, but there's no U in the noun. That's just the way it is. (That is also the way it is with many other nouns related to adjectives ending in -ous, but "curiosity" is one I think I've seen this mistake made with particularly often, curiously enough.)
  • Definite. Definitely not "definate".
  • Deity. Not diety. Perhaps a god of meal planning would be a diety deity?
  • Destroy. Not destory. To destory would mean, perhaps, to excise from a novel.
  • Disappoint. Not dissapoint.
  • Disdain, not distain.
  • Ecstasy, not exstasy or ecstacy or exstacy.
  • Etc. Not ect. Though really, there's nothing wrong with spelling it out: et cetera.
  • Exercise. Not excersize or exercize or whatever else you want to do with it.
  • Existence. Not existance.
  • Expatriate. This often seems to be misspelled "ex-patriot", a misspelling presumably based on a folk etymology that's kind of understandable, but, well, still wrong. An expatriate—someone who lives in a country other than his native land—may, after all, still remain patriotic.
  • Explanation, not explaination.
  • Forty, not fourty.
  • Gauge, not gague.
  • Genius, not genious.
  • Gibberish, not jibberish.
  • Gist, not jist.
  • Grammar, not grammer.
  • Guard, not gaurd. (And likewise guardian, not gaurdian.)
  • Hamster, not hampster.
  • HomIcide, not homOcide.
  • Hypocrisy, not hypocracy. Unless you're talking about a government run by hypodermic needles. Which... you probably shouldn't.
  • Inaccurate, not innacurate. Ditto for most other words including the negative prefix "in"—unless the root itself starts with n (as in innavigable, innominate, innoetic), there's only a single n after the i.
  • Infinite, not infinate.
  • Interrupt. Two rs.
  • Leapt, not lept. ("Leaped" is also acceptable, but "lept" is not.)
  • Leery, not leary. Unless you're talking about Denis (which presumably you're not, because I don't know why you'd need to refer to him in a Wongery article). Or maybe making a comparison with a Shakespearian king.
  • Millennium. Not milennium or millenium. Two ls, two ns. Same with the plural—millennia, not millenia or milennia. (Oddly, however, an adjective relating to a millennium, "millenary", does have only one n, as does a word, "millenarian", referring to people with the belief in the Christian concept of the Millennium. (Well, okay, that one does have two ns, but not in a row.) But those words are much rarer.)
  • Minuscule, not miniscule. (Think minus, not mini-.)
  • Mischievous, not mischevious. There are a lot of English words that end in -ious, yes. Mischievous isn't one of them. (This one's so common that people even frequently mispronounce the word to match the misspelling—it's /ˈmɪstʃəvəs/, not /mɪsˈtʃiːviəs/.)
  • Missile, not missle.
  • Misspell, not mispell. (Arguably, misspelling this word is particularly ironic.)
  • Monocle, not monacle.
  • Nonsense. Not nonesense.
  • Non sequitur. Not sequitor, or sequiter. Sequitur. U-R.
  • Occurred, not occured or ocurred.
  • Ogle, not oggle or oogle. (I'm not sure where those misspellings come from—the word's not even pronounced the ways those spellings imply! It's /ˈoʊgəl/, not /ˈɒgəl/ or /ˈuːgəl/.)
  • Oops, not opps. Yes, it's an informal interjection; that doesn't mean it doesn't have a correct spelling.
  • Pastime, not passtime or past time or pass time. (That is, as a noun, referring to a pursuit or hobby; "past time" could make sense as the opposite of "future time", or "pass time" as a verb meaning to remain occupied.)
  • Pejorative, not perjorative.
  • Per se, not per say.
  • Pigeon. People seem to like sticking a D in this word. It doesn't belong there.
  • Plagiarism. I'm not even going to try to list the bizarre panoply of vowels, digraphs, and trigraphs I've seen thrown in instead of the "IA" (and sometimes instead of the initial A, too).
  • Possession, not posession or possesion. Both Ss are doubled.
  • Prima donna, not pre-madonna. As amusing as the implications of "pre-madonna" may be.
  • Prison, not prision.
  • Privilege, not priviledge or privelege or... well, or anything but privilege.
  • Raccoon, not racoon.
  • Renowned. This one seems to be very commonly misspelled. First of all, the -ed at the end seems to be left off a lot. "Renown" by itself is a word, but it's a noun; the adjective is "renowned". A renowned wizard is a wizard of great renown. Secondly, apparently through a process of folk etymology, a lot of people seem to think it comes from "known" (it doesn't), and stick a K in it. Don't do that. "Reknown" would just mean "known again", and "reknowned" doesn't make sense at all.
  • Ridiculous. Not rediculous.
  • Separate, not seperate.
  • Straitjacket, not straightjacket. The word has nothing to do with "straightness"; it comes from "strait", meaning narrow, a word otherwise mostly obsolete except in the participial compound "strait-laced" and the Biblically-derived pleonasm "strait and narrow" (which, likewise, are often misspelled "straight-laced" and "straight and narrow", though in the latter case at least this "misspelling" has surpassed the original in frequency, to the extent that it can perhaps be considered a correct alternative phrase inspired by the Biblical one).
  • Supersede, not supercede. Yes, in pretty much every other word ending in "-ede" with an /s/ sound before it, that /s/ is spelled with a c (as in concede, intercede, recede, secede, and several others). "Supersede", the only common English word ending in "-sede", is an exception. (A few dictionaries do list "supercede" as an acceptable variant, but they're very much in the minority; most dictionaries, if they include "supercede" at all, state it to be a misspelling of "supersede".)
    • In fact, not only is "supersede" the only common English word ending in "-sede", according to most dictionaries it's the only English word ending in "-sede", period. The Oxford English Dictionary does list a few other words ending in "-sede" (such as "essede", "obsede", and "possede"), but they're all marked as obsolete. (Which doesn't mean we may not at some point use one or more of them in the Wongery anyway.)
  • Surprise. Not "suprise". There's an R before the P.
  • Tentacle, not tentical.
  • Tomorrow. Not tommorow. The R is doubled, not the M.
  • Tongue, not tounge.
  • Upon, not opun.
  • Useful, not usefull. And that goes for most other words ending in -ful, as well, such as handful, spoonful, suspenseful, etc. The standalone adjective has two ls, but the suffix only has one.
  • Vague, not vauge.
  • Voilà. This is the interjection you make when you are making a dramatic revelation. It's spelled "voilà". Not "wah-lah" or or "walah" or "wallah" or "vuala". ("Wallah" is in fact a word, but it's a very different word, and is almost certainly not the word you mean—it's a word that was used in colonial India to refer to a person encharged with a particular duty. Though it's since come to be used in the United Kingdom as an informal way to refer to a person, roughly a synonym of "bloke".) It's pronounced sort of like "wah-lah" (there's supposed to be a V sound at the beginning, but it's easily missed), but it's spelled "voilà". It's a French word.
  • Weird, not wierd.

Proper names

  • Cthulhu, not Cthulu or Chthulu or Cthuhlu or C'thulhu. Granted, this name is supposed to be only a rough transliteration from an alien language, so one could argue that multiple spellings could logically exist. Still, the generally accepted spelling, and the one used by Lovecraft, is "Cthulhu".
  • Gandhi, not Ghandi.
  • Genghis Khan, not Ghengis Khan. Actually, "Genghis" is transliterated a whole lot of different ways. There are arguments for spelling it Cengez, Chengez, Chinggis, Chingis, Djingis, Jenghis, and a whole host of other ways. (And "Khan" can be spelled a few other ways, too.) The standard English spelling, however, is "Genghis"... and I've never seen it spelled "Ghengis" in any remotely scholarly works.

See also

External links

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