Separate
I saw a report somewhere recently from 2010 that said that a study had found that "the word 'separate' is the most commonly misspelled one in the English language. The eight-letter description of people or objects which are set apart from each other came top due to the regular placing of an 'E' where the first 'A' sits. I am excellent at spelling but I do remember getting this wrong once.
A spokesman for OnePoll.com, which carried out the study among 3,500 Brits, said: "There seem to be some words which we always struggle to get down onto paper, and 'separate' is one of those which eludes us. A common mistake many make is writing a word the way it sounds which leaves us muddling up one letter with another and getting it wrong. Fortunately, computers' spell-check corrects wrongly spelt words for us, but that means we become lazy and never learn the correct spelling."
1 comment:
I'm not sure that spell-checkers make those of us who are poor spellers, lazy, Gary. The only way some of us learn how to choose the correct vowel is to vie with the spell-checker time after time until our fingers remember where to go even if our conscious minds are still caught in a dilemma. Where spell-checking laziness does come in is when we inadvertently type the wrong word and don't correct it afterwards because all we've looked to see is that it's spelt correctly.
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