When I came into journalism in 1977, I was commissioned by the American Society of Newspaper Editors to create a spelling test for reporters and editors. That idea seemed lame, I thought, until the day I stood next to a news editor who had misspelled the word “dilemma” in a huge headline. As soon as she saw she had added an extra “l,” she began to cry. OK, I get it. In this world, at least, spelling counts.
So I set out to create a list of commonly misspelled words. My criterion was simple: It had to be a word that I might find misspelled in any given newspaper on any given day. Exotic or foreign words were not the problem. Any goofball can Google schadenfreude or eleemosynary. The problem was a word like dilemma. How many l’s, how many m’s?
Or “forty.” “Where’s the u?” asked my colleague Kelly McBride. “Why isn’t there a u?” To complicate matters, Kelly’s daughter Molly has turned 14. By what logic is the daughter’s age spelled fourteen but the mother’s forty-one?
After I compiled my list, I took the test myself and got five wrong out of 25. (Remember, I compiled the test and still got five wrong.) I’ve learned over the years that anyone who gets fewer than five wrong turns out to be a pretty good speller, and usually an avid reader. Some working journalists get as many as 15 wrong.
When I first experimented on a group of professionals, the most experienced journalist scored the lowest, missing 19 of 25. “I’m a terrible speller,” moaned Wilbur Landry, who had covered the world as a foreign correspondent and now lives in that hellmouth for bad spellers — France. (It turns out, though, that Wilbur can spell and order “wine” in several languages.) But Wilbur’s editor once assured me, “He never misses a word. He knows he’s a bad speller, so if he’s unsure he looks it up.”
The word schadenfreude is borrowed from German and denotes the act of taking pleasure in another person’s discomfort. Eleemosynary comes from the Greek and is a synonym for charitable. It is also the title of a splendid little play by Lee Blessing about a young girl who navigates the currents between a distant mother and an overbearing grandmother. The girl, Echo, controls her world through mastery of difficult spelling words. As I watched the play, I kept track of the words I could spell. I got nuisance, but flopped on limicolous (dwelling in the mud); periptery (air surrounding a moving body); nyctitropic (the tendency of some plants to assume a different position at night than during the day), and many, many more.
With no cognitive research to back this up, I imagine that the ability to excel in a spelling bee takes a different kind of skill from the one that makes you a reliable speller in daily life. (Just as some classical pianists, who play by muscle memory, often lack the ability to play by ear.) Echo may know how to spell rataplan (sound of a drum) or bijouterie (jewel collection), but is unlikely to use those words in a love note or business letter.
You need not be a spelling bee nerd to learn how to spell a word. It’s not magic. Look it up. Better still, keep a list of the tough words handy. When you misspell a word, memorize the correct spelling with a vow that you’ll never get that one wrong again. The universe of commonly misspelled words is finite, not vast. You’ll go a long way by mastering this list:
acknowledgment (The American Heritage Dictionary also permits acknowledgement, but prefers to drop that extra “e,” and so do I.)
acquiesce (The “sce” ending always gives me problems, as in reminisce.)
aphrodisiac (Named after Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love. Would that make an afrodisiac something that gives you a desire to listen to “Earth, Wind and Fire”?)
appropriate (Most words beginning with an “ap” are followed by another p; so if you’ve got to guess, go with app …)
camaraderie (I don’t understand how we get from “comrade” to this vowely abstraction, but I learned how to spell it by following a simple consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel pattern.)
carcass (I can now spell any word that ends with -ass.)
Caribbean (You’ll have to look up exotic place names, except for Lake Titicaca, of course. But commit to memory the ones you are likely to use most often: Mediterranean, Schenectady, Mississippi, Albuquerque.)
cemetery (Just remember “three e’s.”)
congratulate (Sounds like that first “t” should be a “d.” You can see part of the word gratis in the middle, derived from the Latin for gift.)
colonel (A homophone with kernel. Just remember “the colonial colonel.”)
commitment (But if the suffix begins with a consonant, as -ment, you do not double the previous letter. I remember this because of Roddy Doyle’s novel about an Irish soul band: “The Commitments.”)
committed (A reliable rule is that when you add an “ed” to a verb ending in a consonant, you double the consonant: referred.)
conscience (While homophones — words that sound the same but have different meanings — are always a problem, so are words that sound alike, but not exactly alike, which why we confuse this with conscious.)
definitely (It helps me to see the word finite in the middle.)
diaphragm (That “g” is silent in words such as phlegm, but can be heard in phlegmatic.)
dilemma (After watching the weeping news editor, I can never misspell this one.)
dumbbell (A bit old-fashioned to use for exercise weights or dumb jocks, but retains an enduring if politically incorrect charm.)
embarrass (Two r’s and two s’es.)
flier (My high school team name was The Flyers, so I object to the use of flier to denote both the aviator and the leaflet.)
forty (Go figure.)
gauge (Tough one to remember, as is gouge.)
genuine (Just take out your wallet, which probably claims to be “genuine leather.”)
handkerchief (When I was a kid, I was blown away by this spelling, until I realized it denoted a small kerchief, one you held in your hand.)
hemorrhage (If you can spell this, you can spell hemorrhoid. Cheers.)
hors d’oeuvres (Damn the French, except for the food, of course. Looks like it could mean the work of horses or the work of whores, but literally means “outside the main work.” Yummy.)
inoculate (Most people want to add another “n.” I remember the phrase “in the eye” because oculus is Latin for eye.)
judgment (Now that I remember to leave out the “e” in the middle, the AHD gives its blessing, but not its preference, to judgement.)
liaison (Three vowels in a row are bound to screw you up.)
lieutenant (Now that I’ve learned the origin, I’ll never misspell it again. It comes from the French word lieu or place, as in “in lieu of flowers.” A lieutenant is a place holder.)
limousine (Did I say something nasty about the French?)
manageable
millennium (Misspelled a thousand times. It literally means a thousand years. The Latin word for year is annum, as in per annum or anniversary, which gives us the double n.)
minuscule (I misspelled this until I remembered the word begins with “minus.”)
misspell (Always fun to get this one wrong.)
neighbor (I learned this in fourth grade: “i” before “e,” except after “c,” or when sounded like -ay, as in neighbor and weigh.)
noticeable
occurrence (One more time.)
paramour (You say to your sweetheart, “Oh, you!” or O-U.)
perseverance (A good severance package helps you persevere.)
premiere (This refers to an event held for the first time, as in the premiere of a movie, but if you mean a head of state or the first among many, lop off that final e.)
questionnaire (See rule under committed.)
pastime (Baseball fans usually get this one.)
playwright (Playwrite is the understandable mistake, until you learn that wright means maker, as in cartwright or wheelwright or wainwright or boatwright.)
pneumonia (Not sure why that initial “p” before a consonant likes to keep its mouth shut.)
ptomaine (Old, bad joke: If you get ptomaine poisoning, we may have to call a toe truck and then cut off your main toe.)
receive
reconnaissance — My editor alerted me to the fact that I misspelled this word in my first draft.
reconnoiter
relieve (My mom taught me to remember certain ie words this way: You believe a lie.)
Renaissance (Some words mark a specific historical period, but can be used in a broader sense, without the initial capital letter, in this case to mean rebirth.”)
rendezvous (Sometimes it helps to remember a foreign word by giving it a conventional English pronunciation, just for fun: “Sweetheart, let’s have a romantic ron-dez-voos.”)
rhythm (Often paired with rhyme.)
sabotage (I now know that a sabot is a wooden shoe that could be taken off and banged on a table to subvert work.)
siege
seize (I remember seize and siege as a pair. If I say “seize the day,” I know the other one is an “ie” word.)
separate (People want to write seperate, but to a golfer like me, it would be below par.)
sergeant (It appears as if care is needed with words of military rank.)
suede (From the French word for Swede.)
supersede (I never get this right. Grrr. Perhaps I can remember that the secret of success lives in the first letter.)
threshold (The way I pronounce it, sounds like it should have another “h.”)
thoroughfare (Folks who learn English as a second language find the “ough” spellings and pronunciations a huge problem.)
traveling (AHD blesses both a single “l” and a “double l” solution.)
vacuum (Vacume would be too easy, and not as visually arresting as that double u.)
vignette
weird (Seems to me that it should be “ie,” but then the word is, after all, weird.)
There are more than 60 words in that list, and they are the kinds of words I was sure to misspell, until I committed such words to memory. Of course, this list does not account for all the mistakes we make when we confuse homophones (its and it’s), or funky plurals, or words that sound alike (allusion and illusion), but these will be handled in other chapters.
[Which spelling words drive you crazy? Which ones should we add to this list?]
Coming next: Gone with a Wind: Why the little words mean a lot.
