Spelling trouble

The results are in … for Britain’s top ten most frequently misspelt words. And the winners are:

1 Definitely (Definately)
2 Sacrilegious (Sacreligious)
3 Indict (Indite)
4 Manoeuvre (Maneouvre)
5 Bureaucracy (Beaurocracy)
6 Broccoli (Brocolli)
7 Phlegm (Phleghm)
8 Prejudice (Predjudice)
9 Consensus (Conscensus)
10 Unnecessary (Unecessary)*

(Please note: the incorrect spellings are the bracketed words.)

Although a few of these may cause the odd sharp intake of breath from spelling champions everywhere, the mistakes are – by and large – fairly logical. The problem, of course, is that spelling in the English language is often anything but.

George Bernard Shaw once pointed out that the word ‘fish’ could just as easily – in English spelling terms – be written ‘ghoti’. And why? Consider these pronunciations:

•       the ‘gh’ in ‘cough’
•       the ‘o’ in ‘women’
•       the ‘ti’ in ‘potion’.

In the face of this kind of logic, it might seem we are all doomed.

We can offer a small amount of help with the number one culprit: just think of the finite amount of patience you need to have to spell ‘definite’.

If you have any ideas for mnemonics for the rest of the list, or you’ve got a white whale of a word you can never quite spell correctly, do let us know. And perhaps try eating more ghoti – it’s meant to be brain food.

* Results from www.OnePoll.com

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Author: Catie Holdridge

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Catie joined Emphasis with an English literature and creative writing degree and a keen interest in what makes language work. Having researched, written, commissioned and edited dozens of articles for the Emphasis blog, she now knows more about the intricacies of effective professional writing than she ever thought possible.

She produced and co-wrote our online training programme, The Complete Business Writer, and these days oversees all the Emphasis marketing efforts. And she keeps office repartee at a suitably literary level.