Commonly Misspelled Words and How to Remember Them

The words people misspell most tend to have doubled letters in surprising places (accommodate, committee, misspell), vowels you can’t hear clearly (definitely, separate, cemetery) or spellings borrowed from another language (broccoli, embarrass). The fix is usually one small trick per word: Merriam-Webster’s tip for definitely, for instance, is that it contains the word finite, so there’s no a in it (Merriam-Webster). Below are the usual suspects, with the reason each one trips people up and a way to remember it.

Commonly misspelled words, with memory tricks

Unless another source is linked, the tips here come from Merriam-Webster’s two lists of commonly misspelled words (list 1, list 2).

Correct spelling	Common mistake	How to remember it
absence	absense	It’s spelled like absent until the ending, then -ence.
accommodate	accomodate	Two c’s and two m’s, from Latin. The word date is at the end.
accidentally	accidently	It’s accident + al + ly.
basically	basicly	English almost never ends words in -icly. Publicly is about the only one.
broccoli	brocolli	Double c, single l, from Italian.
cemetery	cemetary	Only e’s for vowels until the final y.
committee	comittee	Double m, double t, double e.
consensus	concensus	Only one c. Every other /s/ sound is an s.
definitely	definately	It contains finite, so keep the a’s out.
gauge	guage	The a comes before the u.
itinerary	itinery	It comes from itinerant. Merriam-Webster’s trick: “it in (y)er (c)ar.”
misspell	mispell	One s for mis- and one for spell.
occasion	occassion	Two c’s, one s.
separate	seperate	Para sits in the middle, like a parachute.
temperature	temperture	It starts with temper, then a, then -ture.
tomorrow	tommorrow	One m: to like today, then morrow, spelled like borrow.
vacuum	vaccum	Two u’s, from Latin vacuus, meaning empty.
withhold	withold	It’s with + hold, so two h’s.

Some “mistakes” are really variants. Merriam-Webster lists judgement as a variant of judgment, and notes that judgement is the older form (Merriam-Webster). It also lists accidently in its dictionaries, though it’s far less common than accidentally and often criticized as an error (Merriam-Webster). If you write for school or work, stick to the main spelling.

Three words people argue about

• Minuscule follows the Latin minusculus. Miniscule probably caught on because people link it with mini- and minimum. Merriam-Webster labels it a disputed variant that usage commentators generally consider an error, while noting it does appear in carefully edited publications (Merriam-Webster).
• Supersede comes from Latin supersedēre, “to sit on top of.” Some of the earliest English records spell it with a c, and both spellings have historical support, but supersede won out as the accepted form (Merriam-Webster).
• License and maneuver are the American spellings. British English uses licence and manoeuvre (Merriam-Webster).

Why “i before e except after c” lets you down

Merriam-Webster is blunt about it: “The famous rhyme is wrong.” The rule reliably works only for one family of words that came through French, such as receive, perceive, conceive, deceive and receipt. Most of the exceptions, like eight, weigh, neighbor, sleigh and weird, have Old English roots. Others include seize, height, albeit, science and forfeit (Merriam-Webster).

The rule does get some words right. Achieve follows it, and it’s on Merriam-Webster’s misspelled list anyway (Merriam-Webster).

Why English spelling is so hard

Much of the mess dates from the arrival of printing. In the late 1400s, printers began printing books in the London English that had already become a kind of standard, and English spelling became gradually more regular between 1475 and about 1630. That froze spellings in their late Middle English form at the same time the Great Vowel Shift was changing how the vowels sounded, so spelling and pronunciation drifted apart (Oxford English Dictionary).

Around the same period, some words were respelled to look more like their Latin ancestors. Doubt was doute in Middle English, and fault was faute. In some of these words the pronunciation changed to match, and in others it didn’t, which is where silent letters such as the b in doubt come from (same source).

American spelling added another layer. Noah Webster, the dictionary maker, wanted spellings that matched pronunciation and an American English distinct from British, so his dictionaries dropped the u from words like favour, colour and honour (Merriam-Webster). That’s why the same word can be right in one country and “wrong” in another.

What actually helps you remember

Two kinds of study have good evidence behind them:

• Say it the way it’s spelled. In a randomized study of 42 college students, those taught to read hard words with a “spelling pronunciation,” pronouncing each word the way it’s written rather than the way it’s normally said, recalled the spellings of 20 commonly misspelled words better than students who read them normally. Poor spellers benefited as much as good spellers, if not more (Ocal & Ehri, 2017).
• Test yourself instead of copying. In three experiments with first and second graders, words practiced by recalling and writing them from memory were spelled more accurately than words practiced by tracing over them in colors. In the first experiment the advantage was still there five weeks later (Jones et al., 2016). That study was with young children, but the authors see it as extending the well-established testing effect, the finding that recalling something strengthens memory for it, to beginning spellers.

Put together: keep a short list of the words you get wrong, say each one as it’s spelled, and quiz yourself on them every few days instead of rereading them. If you’re preparing for a competition rather than everyday writing, our guide on how to study for a spelling bee covers that in more depth.