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Words I assumed I had not been misspelling until greeted somewhere by the fact of my wrongness

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A list of 100 words by she.

About

Catching a misspelling is both pleasurable (hooray learning!) and painful (every sentence you now realize you've ever marred with the offending word flashes to mind in one terrible instant).
Here are mine to date.

*that is, any word I can remember ever confusing or eluding me since reaching an age where one could reasonably be expected to spell more things correctly than incorrectly

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  • Prolagus Oh, I talked about that on thingy... Sep 26, 2008

  • Prolagus In Italian, spelling is not such a big problem - we have a bunch of letters with two possible pronunciations, and the rest of them is always pronounced the same way*. A few words are a bit harder, though:
    accelerare (to accelerate), usually pronounced "accellerare";
    piovigginare (to drizzle), that almost no one pronounces correctly** ("pioviginare", "piovvigginare", "piovviginare"...);
    and collutorio (mouthwash), that gets more google results with the wrong spelling "colluttorio".

    * Approximately, of course.
    ** Including me. Sep 26, 2008

  • frindley exhuberant! Sep 26, 2008

  • Telofy Being German I write much less English than most of you I guess, so only a few months ago, spell-checking a readme and a changelog file for an OpenSource tool I wrote, I also had the same "separate" epiphany. Had to correct it in almost every file... ^^
    "interesting" came out a bit earlier. Sep 26, 2008

  • mollusque I remember once in second grade puzzling over "ov" and "uv" but not arriving at "of". In fifth grade kindergarten knocked me out of the spelling bee. Aug 10, 2008

  • she Tanks, kingran!

    This may make you feel better, sarra — my first addition to this list is the most embarrassing: the correct spelling of "seperate" didn't dawn on me until well, well into high school. I still have no idea how, in years of papers, emails and IM conversations, not one person noticed or cared enough to correct me. Yeeearrsss. Aug 9, 2008

  • sarra Oh, and “flourescent” for me too! Aug 9, 2008

  • sarra Ooooh. The memory-sticking ones for me are “enviroment” (age 11, but I think I'd barely used it before being told) and “oppurtunity” (somewhere in my teens, which was much more embarrassing). Aug 9, 2008

  • kringlan Intresting and impresive! Aug 9, 2008

  • reesetee Great list, she--and let's face it, most of spellings aren't especially logical in the first place, so you can forgive yourself that much. :-) Jul 11, 2008

  • she Why thank you, miss.
    I think it's really one of the most useful self-serving lists to make—I'm digging all the way back to gradeschool (There are words left to add! but I'm pacing myself).. As George Santayana (Google tells me) said, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And now I have this handy reference going. Jul 11, 2008

  • jennarenn I love this list. So fresh and honest. :) Jul 11, 2008