Catie Holdridge
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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