Words you ALWAYS misspell

Messenger. I just spelled right on the first try, but when I spellchecked my novel it came up a half-dozen times. I want the second e to be an a.

For many years I also wanted there to be two l's in jewelry and traveler.

Took me a long time to figure out that renumeration is actually remuneration.

Any word involving "ie". Especially "weird", which breaks the rule.

Right now, "Cassiopeiae" as in Beta Cassiopeiae. Someone puked up vowels at the end of that.

Like TheCuriousOne, I touch-type, and some words type themselves, whether they've been invited or not.

double consonants throw me

BethS said:

Yes, but can you pronounce it correctly?

An astonishing number of people don't.

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I found out recently that I (and most of the people I know) don't. I was taught to say miss chee vee us instead of mis che vus.

Note, I grew up in Southern CA, and my parents were university folks, so it's not an isolated demographic or education thing.

blacbird said:

No nation ever has so loved the multiple vowels and silent consonants as do the French.

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But they actually make very consistent, specific sounds when combined, and the silent consonants follow set grammatical rules. French's spelling (and pronunciation!) make much, MUCH more sense than English's.

+Lieutenant is easy for me to remember because it's lieu (place) tenant (holding). French.

re: words I always misspell: the -ent/ence vs. -ant/ance ones drive me CRAZY, especially since some of them are different from English to French like existent (English) vs. existant (French). I always want to write existant/nonexistant. :|

Vacuum, maintenance, and rendezvous all gave me trouble for the longest time. I finally sat myself down and memorized the spelling. My problem isn't misspelling words, it's mistyping words.

Conscious

Conscience

Roxxsmom said:

Note, I grew up in Southern CA, and my parents were university folks, so it's not an isolated demographic or education thing.

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It's everywhere.

Sherriff
Sheriff?
Sherrif?

Not a big deal, except when I started writing a Western. Damn Sherriff is on every other page. Sheriff.

Roxxsmom said:

sihluoette, um, silhuoette, um, silhoutte, silhouette.

Damn, I can't even spell that one right if the word is right in front of me. My mind's eye refuses to "see" or remember the letters in the correct order. Takes multiple "trial and error" tries each time.

Unnecessary gets me sometimes too. Like JJ, I often end up doubling the wrong letters.

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Shunter said:

Beaurocracy. Bureaucracy. Wow, right on the second try, that's a first (sorta). Vowel strings always get me.

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^^^ Those.

And florescent.

I once even inadvertently added florescent to my spellchecker dictionary, misspelled. I'm hopeless.

I also have a hard time with callosum.

TheCuriousOne said:

I touch-type and my N finger always always gets carried away when I type "ratio"... and it ends up becoming "ration" just because of habit.

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I do this too, but it reminded me of something I used to do.

I studied physics. After I finished my degree, I couldn't write the letter "h" by hand without turning it into an "h-bar", i.e. Planck's constant.

There was one time I wrote an "h", turned it into an "h-bar" automatically, scribbled it out, tried to correct it, did it again, scribbled it out to correct it again -- and turned it into an "h-bar" a third time.

i.e. It took me four tries in a row to write the "h" as just "h". My hand was well-trained; it wasn't brooking any interference from me.

Typing-wise, my fingers are always turning adjectives into adverbs. They just like to add -ly to things.

Mentally, "caricature". I can't get it through my thick head that it doesn't start with ch-.

Shunter said:

Beaurocracy. Bureaucracy. Wow, right on the second try, that's a first (sorta). Vowel strings always get me.

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I'm a terrible speller and this word, more than any other, continually gives me fits. Hmm, probably because I hate bureaucracy so much.

Roxxsmom said:

sihluoette, um, silhuoette, um, silhoutte, silhouette.

Damn, I can't even spell that one right if the word is right in front of me. My mind's eye refuses to "see" or remember the letters in the correct order. Takes multiple "trial and error" tries each time.

Unnecessary gets me sometimes too. Like JJ, I often end up doubling the wrong letters.

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I wrote this word last night for a scene in my WIP. I don't recall ever writing the word before. It took me several times to get it right.

pandaponies said:

But they actually make very consistent, specific sounds when combined, and the silent consonants follow set grammatical rules. French's spelling (and pronunciation!) make much, MUCH more sense than English's.
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Maybe it makes more sense, logically (I couldn't judge), but "Qu'est-ce que c'est" has an unreasonable number of letters for a pronunciation of "kess kuh say".

But let's not judge only the French for English's tricky spellings! (Despite "bureaucracy" being another example.) The reason why we have that whole random "ie" and "ei" conundrum is thanks to the Germans.

It makes sense when you're speaking German, because they pronounce "ie" and "ei" differently, e.g. "bier" and "wein" (beer and wine). We just grabbed their words and not their vocal distinctions -- like stealing someone's fine hat and wearing it with our sweatpants.

This whole knocking-other-languages-down-and-rummaging-their-pockets thing that English does certainly has its downside.

Jamesaritchie said:

My problem isn't misspelling words, it's mistyping words.

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Same here, I type too fast. It's not advantageous. Along with that, I have a tendency due to typing speed to leave out words.

BethS said:

Yes, but can you pronounce it correctly?

An astonishing number of people don't.

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*mischievous*

I always thought it was a British vs American pronunciation difference.

I had a British Anthropology professor who liked to rub our noses in the British pronunciation of words like aluminum and garage. IIRC, he pronounced it miss-che-vus.

For some reason he loved to say thrice, with a rolling "r" like the Spanish "r."

I second maintenance. I always want to type it as maintainence, which just makes more sense to my brain.

The other one is any variation of the word convenience. I actually had to write it a lot at my job (photo machines were always breaking) and I could never get it right. No spellcheck on kiosks. I actually can spell it correctly most of the time these days.

I do mistype words a lot, mostly on my phone but sometimes I just type too fast for my own good; not bad for a reformed two-finger typist.

I actually picked up, I wouldn't call it a trick so much as a way to help teach myself how to spell. Any time I spell a word I know I have trouble with incorrectly, I'll go back and try to fix it myself instead of letting spellcheck handle it. Even if I don't get it right all the time, I will eventually get it most of the time. Probably read about it on reddit and as far as I can tell, it does work.

jjdebenedictis said:

Maybe it makes more sense, logically (I couldn't judge), but "Qu'est-ce que c'est" has an unreasonable number of letters for a pronunciation of "kess kuh say".

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Well, without the elision, grammatically it's "que est-ce que ce est" - (with "oo" being like the "oo" in "book," not "room") koo eh-soo koo soo eh - but French likes for everything to flow, so sounds tend to get deleted anywhere they'd produce an awkward break in the pronunciation, lol. But those deletions are still completely consistent/there are strict rules. Once you know how to speak French, you know how to pronounce everything. I can't remember the last time I had to look up how to pronounce a French word (it was probably years ago, before my French degree happened, lol), but I STILL end up googling "____ pronunciation" or "____ IPA" for English words all the time, and English is my first language! We have SO MANY freaking exceptions. And yes, many of them come from loanwords, but still. It's awful. I do not envy people who learned it as a second language.

Sorry for the slight derail. But "WTF English pronunciation" is still somewhat relevant to "WTF English spelling"? Haha.

Layla Nahar said:

*anything* with 'i' and 'e' together...

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i before e, except after c .... what a weird society!

Shunter said:

Beaurocracy. Bureaucracy. Wow, right on the second try, that's a first (sorta). Vowel strings always get me.

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That one gets me too. Even just bureau by itself.

PandaMan said:

I had a British Anthropology professor who liked to rub our noses in the British pronunciation of words like aluminum and garage.

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Well, aluminum, at least, has an extra syllable in the UK version. Aluminium. So their pronunciation is justified.

Garage is just the difference between the French pronunciation (which Americans retained) and the Brits' localized version, which is something they frequently do with foreign words.

IIRC, he pronounced it miss-che-vus

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That's correct, as long as the emphasis is on the first syllable, and "che" is not pronounced "chee."

Seanchar said:

Same here, I type too fast. It's not advantageous. Along with that, I have a tendency due to typing speed to leave out words.

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My big typing mistake is hitting the space bar before I type the last letter of a word. Sometimes spell check doesn't catch this, such as when I intend to write "does not", but type "doe snot". I'm a good proofreader, but I've sent editors stories at least twice that contained the words "doe snot". They laugh, I blush.

If I stick to sixty or sixty-five words per minutes, I can type pretty much error free. Unfortunately, when I get caught up in writing, I often type at eighty or ninety words per minute, and I get a terrible case of spacebaritis.

Jamesaritchie said:

My big typing mistake is hitting the space bar before I type the last letter of a word. Sometimes spell check doesn't catch this, such as when I intend to write "does not", but type "doe snot". I'm a good proofreader, but I've sent editors stories at least twice that contained the words "doe snot". They laugh, I blush.

If I stick to sixty or sixty-five words per minutes, I can type pretty much error free. Unfortunately, when I get caught up in writing, I often type at eighty or ninety words per minute, and I get a terrible case of spacebaritis.

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I am so laughing. I do this too. I am not alone.