Commonly misspelled English words, and the tricks that fix them for good

Spelling & writing · Published 2026-09-24

The same few dozen words turn up on every list of common misspellings. They are not random: each one sets a specific trap. Learn the trap and the word stops being a problem.

English spelling is hard for well-documented historical reasons: the language borrowed heavily from French, Latin and Greek, and its spelling was largely fixed by printers and dictionary makers while pronunciation kept changing. The result is that sound is a poor guide to letters in a predictable set of places. Below, the usual suspects are grouped by the mistake they invite. If you want to test yourself, paste a paragraph into the spell checker and see which ones you reach for.

Trap 1: doubled letters

Whether a consonant is single or double is mostly silent in speech, so this is the largest group.

The last example shows the most reliable trick in this group: split off the prefix. Un + necessary gives unnecessary with two n's; mis + spell gives misspell with two s's; dis + appoint gives disappoint with only one.

Trap 2: the unstressed vowel

In English, vowels in unstressed syllables tend to collapse into the same neutral sound, the schwa. You hear "sep-uh-rate", and nothing tells you which vowel the "uh" is.

• separate, not seperate. The classic aid: there is a rat in separate. The Latin root separare has an a in the same place.
• definitely, not definately. It comes from finite, which you pronounce clearly: de-finite-ly.
• grammar, not grammer. Do not mar your grammar.
• calendar, not calender. (A calender does exist, a machine that presses paper or cloth, which is exactly why a checker with a huge word list will not flag it.)
• cemetery, not cemetary: three e's.
• independent, not independant: the ending is -ent throughout, as in dependent (in American usage; British English uses dependant for the noun meaning a person who depends on another).

The general method: find a related word where the vowel is stressed. Grammatical reveals the a in grammar, definition the i in definite, separation does not help (the vowel is still unstressed) but the Latin root does. The method is a guide rather than a law: comparative has an a where comparison has an i. Check the dictionary when in doubt.

Trap 3: ie or ei

"I before e, except after c" works for believe, field, receive and ceiling, and that is why receive and receipt are usually spelled correctly by people who know the rhyme. Its exceptions are notorious: weird, seize, height, foreign, their, neither, and science, which puts ie straight after a c. A longer version of the rhyme adds "or when sounded like a, as in neighbour and weigh", which rescues a few more. Treat the rule as a starting point and learn the exceptions as a list; weird is a weird word, and that is the aid.

Trap 4: silent and swallowed letters

• February: the first r is often not pronounced.
• government: the n before the m disappears in fast speech. It is govern + ment.
• environment: the same pattern, environ + ment.
• Wednesday: the d is silent. Some people memorise it by saying "Wed-nes-day" in their head.
• rhythm: no vowels except y; "rhythm helps your two hips move".
• conscience and conscious: both hide a silent-looking sc; conscience literally contains the word science.
• library, probably: syllables swallowed in speech, kept in writing.

Trap 5: endings that change the stem

Adding a suffix sometimes drops a letter and sometimes keeps it, and the rules are more logical than they look.

• A silent e usually drops before a suffix that starts with a vowel (write → writing, use → usable) and stays before one that starts with a consonant (hope → hopeful, state → statement). The well-known exceptions drop it anyway: argument, truly, ninth, wholly.
• But it stays after soft c or g to keep the sound soft: notice → noticeable, manage → manageable, courage → courageous.
• -ly after -ic is usually -ically (basically, tragically), with one famous exception: publicly.
• Final consonants double in a stressed final syllable: occur → occurred, begin → beginning, but open → opened. British English also doubles a final l in unstressed syllables (travelled), American usually does not (traveled); see American and British spelling.

Trap 6: borrowed words

Loanwords keep the spelling of their source language: liaison (two i's, from French), bureaucracy, entrepreneur, restaurant, questionnaire (double n), connoisseur, fluorescent, pharaoh. Here, knowing the origin genuinely helps, and dictionaries such as Merriam-Webster give the etymology with each entry.

Words that look wrong but are right

A few correct spellings are so often "corrected" by writers that they deserve mention: minuscule (from minus, not mini), supersede (the only common English word ending in -sede), inoculate (one n, one c), dilemma (no n), daiquiri, and a lot, which is always two words.

A practical routine

1. Keep a personal list of the five words you get wrong most often. It will be shorter than you fear.
2. Attach one memory aid to each, from this page or invented. Silly works better than sensible.
3. Run a spell checker, but read its suggestions rather than accepting the first; for accomodate it will be right, for a real-word slip it will be silent.
4. Read the final draft aloud, slowly. You will catch swallowed words and homophones that no checker sees; our list of homophones spell checkers miss helps with those.

For a much longer list, Wikipedia keeps a list of commonly misspelled English words compiled from published sources.