Ask Lemmy

english instructors, were so anal with the words "act and acts" in writing a paper. or cellular and celluar.

In english a lot. Not just because i am dislexic, but also french stemming words are a nightmare

"Litterly" is one i have still no idea how to spell. Or wether, not meaning the weather as in sun and run but the one for implying choice

Australian English is based off British English but is not identical. Both are different to US English and have a lot of words that are spelled with a bit more historical contingency. That said, knowing which words have which version of suffix can be difficult.

For example, authorise or authorize. Practice or practise. Gaol or jail. English is a pain but it does make a good common language.

Somehow I am constantly mistyping "because" as "becsause." I know damn well I am hitting the a before the s but I type really fast (average 120wpm) and on a touchscreen it might be laggy 🤷‍♂️

For some reason unfortunately gave me trouble until I broke it down and remembered to have tuna in there lol

So I just think: unfor tuna tely

Viscous vs vicious.

It’s a viscous cycle.

I always ALWAYS have to check separate / separation / separator. I want to put a third e in there so much.

I fuck up "insure/ensure" and "effect/affect" a lot.

I can never figure out where that pesky u goes in restaurant. (Thank goodness for autocorrect, or I couldn’t have spelled it for this post!)

Pronounce and pronunciation seem like they should have the same root, but one of them has an extra 'o' for some perfectly logical reason. I know the difference and don't consistently misspell it, but if I edit a sentence to switch from one to the other without noticing that it's a danger inflection ...

Also maintain vs. maintenance for the same reason.

Their vs there vs they're.

I know the difference but my fingers clearly do not.

One thing I'm realizing more and more as I type in a game in PC is that I'm only good at spelling the first half of words. I've gotten used to auto correct on phones and spell check in other programs. My errors are typically on the end.

Necessary and apparently are two common words I get wrong fairly often.

• Guarantee
• it(')s

For the pairs you mentioned this might help:

• "loose" is a loose word, it's extra "o" makes it lanky, but "lose" lost an "o"
• "then" is a reply to "when" and is spelt similarly rather "than" the comparison word
• "where" is a question answered by "here;" "was" has no "h" and neither does "were"

Can't recall them, but there are some words in which I keep typing double letters even though they aren't supposed to be there.

ageing vs aging

The former is the way I learned it in school way back in the 70's... Apparently that is the way the British spell it and it sends US citizens into an aneurysm.

One that bothers me the most when people do it is brake vs break. Your car will break if you do not apply the brake in a timely fashion.

Illegitimate/legitimate. Always struggled with that one until I got a phone that could tell me how to spell it.

Nice try, FBI stylometric profiler.

It's only very recently that I learned I've been using the wrong then/than and effect/affect most of the time.

• centennial, millennial, embarrassed, etc. (Where are the double-letters and where are they not? Who fucking knows.)
• backward(s), forward(s), leftward(s), etc. (Do words like this have an S or not? Who fucking knows.)
• reconnaissance (Just fuck this word.)

I habitually throw random spelling and grammatical mistakes into my posts and comments all the time, to make it less likely that anyone can fingerprint my writing style and thereby dox me. That is the only reason for any such errors.

Licence / license, and practice / practise. I have to look them up every single time because I forget which of each is the noun and which is the verb, and even then, there are situations where using the noun as a verb might actually be the right thing to do and I hate the whole thing. So I probably still get those wrong whenever I use them.

Barring brain farts (increasingly common) and muscle memory leading me astray on the keyboard, my spelling is otherwise fairly good, but those pairings I could do without.

Travelling vs traveling

More a typo than a spelling mistake but if a word ends in ‘th’, my brain cannot stop adding an ‘e’.

• withe
• bothe
• mythe

"effecient" instead of "efficient". The funny thing is as I get older I find myself typing homonyms of words instead of the word I meant. My fingers are barely listening to my brain lol

I used to have trouble with necessary. I have pages of notes with neccesary/neseccary/necesary/necessary scribbled in the margins to see which one looked right.

I say wether, not whether, and anyways, not anyway. I also never remember how to write thorought.