Hardest common words for you to spell

[TeethWhitener]

phenophthalein

It’s actually phenolphthalein

Yours truly,
A chemist

 

[Mark44]

It’s actually phenolphthalein

Yours truly,
A chemist

Yeah, I knew that, but accidentally omitted that first 'l' in trying to figure out if the last part was 'ine or 'ein.

 

[sysprog]

I suggest using mnemonic devices that contain cultural reference to aid memory. For instance, for myself, the gerund 'advise' and novel Advise and Consent or film Advise & Consent. 'Consent' spelled with letter 's' as 'advise'.

The word 'advise' isn't a gerund. A gerund may resemble a present participle in that both the gerund and the present participle may be words ending in 'ing', as 'ending' is. The word 'ending' can be either a gerund or a present participle, but the gerund is used as a noun while the past particle is used as a verb.

 

[sysprog]

A pair that posters here frequently misuse is prove vs. proof. Prove is a verb and proof is a noun, at least in the contexts it appears in at this site.

Yes; when you prove [verb] a theorem by providing a proof [noun], it becomes proven [adjective - past participle], because you proved [past tense], and thus have proven [past participle], the theorem, so that it's then a proven [adjective] theorem, but when you soundproof a room, by soundproofing [present participle] it, by the doing [gerund] of adding [present participle] soundproofing [gerundive-nonal-adjective] material to its surfaces you have soundproofed [past tense] it.

 

[mjc123]

The word 'advise' isn't a gerund. A gerund may resemble a present participle in that both the gerund and the present participle may be words ending in 'ing', as 'ending' is. The word 'ending' can be either a gerund or a present participle, but the gerund is used as a noun while the past particle is used as a verb.

"Advise" (with a z sound) is a verb, "advice" (with an s sound) is the noun. The US President appoints officers "with the advice and consent of the Senate". (The book is, however, spelt "advise and consent")

 

[sysprog]

The word 'advise' isn't a gerund. A gerund may resemble a present participle in that both the gerund and the present participle may be words ending in 'ing', as 'ending' is. The word 'ending' can be either a gerund or a present participle, but the gerund is used as a noun while the past particle is used as a verb.

"Advise" (with a z sound) is a verb, "advice" (with an s sound) is the noun. The US President appoints officers "with the advice and consent of the Senate". (The book is, however, spelt "advise and consent")

The distinction between 'advise' and 'advice' was mentioned in post #33 in this thread, and the letter 's' having either an 's sound or a 'z' sound was mentioned in post #37; however, I don't see how any of that is relevant to what you quoted from me -- neither 'advise' [verb] nor 'advice' [noun] is a gerund -- I understand that being expressively fussy about things like that can make one seem like an insufferable pedant, but I think there are at least a few legitimate places outside of perdition for grammarians and orthographists, somewhere aspiring toward the loftier realms indwelled by true philologists.

 

[member 587159]

As a non English speaker, I have different difficulties. It happens more often that I confuse two words, rather than forget how to spell them. I'll buy @PeroK's ships: good advice, or was it advise? I have difficulties to remember the difference. And for some reason I can't figure out, I confuse choose and chose. What really annoys me, is the fact, that since I started to write more English texts, I began to make the standard mistakes and write (right) words as I hear (here) them. That's horrible, the more as I never haven't made them before. Strange.

The chose/choose thing is also hard for me. Can also relate slightly with the other things you wrote.

 

[fresh_42]

The chose/choose thing is also hard for me. Can also relate slightly with the other things you wrote.

I have to admit I have my little revenges. E.g. I always write Abelian or Cartesian with a capital letter. I think, as long as physicists write Hamiltonian and Lagrangian, I can as well write Abelian and Cartesian. This is already a compromise, because I should better write Descartesian. And of course I try to be correct and write Schrödinger, Graßmann, Gauß and L'Hôpital.

 

[Klystron]

The distinction between 'advise' and 'advice' was mentioned in post #33 in this thread, and the letter 's' having either an 's sound or a 'z' sound was mentioned in post #37; however, I don't see how any of that is relevant to what you quoted from me -- neither 'advise' [verb] nor 'advice' [noun] is a gerund -- I understand that being expressively fussy about things like that can make one seem like an insufferable pedant, but I think there are at least a few legitimate places outside of perdition for grammarians and orthographists, somewhere aspiring toward the loftier realms indwelled by true philologists.

Discussing speech forms leads to a wider understanding of the vernacular and to this thread on difficult to spell common words. Perhaps I chose 'gerund' in a mischievous manner not meant to mask my attempt at laissez-faire solution: develop memory associations that help identify words, spell and distinguish word usage.

The movie or book "Advise and Consent" works as a mnemonic for me precisely because of the perceived flaw with political terminology 'advice and consent'. The 's' reminds me of spelling (also 'sent' in 'conSENT' but that mnemonic was invalidated after translation and retracted.). The word choice conflict between artistic titles and common law usage reminds me 'advice' differs from 'advise'.

 

[Mark44]

The chose/choose thing is also hard for me.

I don't see why. The 'o' in "chose" is a long o, with the same sound as "those," "goes", and so on. The "oo" dipthong in "choose" sounds just like "ooh!"
A pair that would be more confusing, IMO and certainly for many others is "lose" (sounds like "looz") and "loose"

 

[sysprog]

The "oo" dipthong in "choose" sounds just like "ooh!"

The 'oo' in 'choose' is a digraph, but unless, e.g., it's pronounced like the 'ew' in 'chews' it isn't a diphthong; when it's pronounced 'o͞o', it's a continuable single long vowel sound as in: 'oops', did someone misspell 'diphthong', or was 'dipthong' merely a typographical error?

 

[member 587159]

I don't see why. The 'o' in "chose" is a long o, with the same sound as "those," "goes", and so on. The "oo" dipthong in "choose" sounds just like "ooh!"
A pair that would be more confusing, IMO and certainly for many others is "lose" (sounds like "looz") and "loose"

Thanks! That will definitely help to remember it. It actually makes sense but in the rush of the moment, mistakes are made.

 

[Mark44]

'oops', did someone misspell 'diphthong', or was 'dipthong' merely a typographical error?

'Twas a misspelling -- I can't blame it on a typo.

 

[sysprog]

'Twas a misspelling -- I can't blame it on a typo.

Your forthrightness is part of what allows readers like me to have confidence in your wonderfully cogent explanatory mathematically-oriented posts.

 

[Mark44]

Your forthrightness is part of what allows readers like me to have confidence in your wonderfully cogent explanatory mathematically-oriented posts.

This is way too nice a compliment for me to just click on an icon for "Like." You made my day! Thank you!

And in return, I very much appreciate the depth of your knowledge in matters of grammar as well as your programming knowledge.

 

[Ophiolite]

I get embarassed by heirarchy.

Some years ago, having delivered a well received in-house presentation on the commercial sucess of one of our new pieces of technology, I was asked to repeat it for the company president. The first slide comes up and he says "You've spelled success incorrectly." On the basis that it is as well to be hung for a sheep, or better a wolf, as for a lamb I replied instantly, "I may not be able to spell success sir, but I certainly know how to achieve it, as the next slides will demonstrate."

 

[Mark44]

I get embarassed by heirarchy.

I see.
Put another 'r' in the first, and switch the 'e' and 'i' on the second, and then you won't be.

In Spanish there's a word embarazada, which at first glance seems related to embarrassed.

Spoiler

It means "pregnant".

 

[sysprog]

I see.
Put another 'r' in the first, and switch the 'e' and 'i' on the second, and then you won't be.

In Spanish there's a word embarazada, which at first glance seems related to embarrassed.

Spoiler

It means "pregnant".

The co-resemblant words are in fact related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarazada

 

[sysprog]

The movie or book "Advise and Consent" works as a mnemonic for me precisely because of the perceived flaw with political terminology 'advice and consent'. . . . The word choice conflict between artistic titles and common law usage reminds me 'advice' differs from 'advise'.

I'm pretty sure that the switch to the verb 'advise' from the noun 'advice' in that title was fully intentional. The word 'consent' is already both noun and verb. The change from 'advice' to 'advise' was, in my opinion, a deliberate play on both of the titular words: to advise [verb] is to give advice [noun]; to consent [verb] is to give consent [noun]. The Constitution uses both words as nouns; the title of the drama, by changing the spelling of the first of them to its verb form, implicitly uses the second of them as a verb also.

I think that your term 'common law usage' distributes the meaning of 'common' over two of the distinct (albeit related) meanings that it has in the two terms 'common usage' and 'common law'. To distinguish those, one could say either 'the common usage in matters of law' or 'the usage in common law'.

 

[sysprog]

I get embarassed by heirarchy.

The first four letters of the word 'hierarchy' are from the romanization of the Greek word (in combining form) 'ἱερο' ('hiero'), meaning holy or sacred, You may be getting sidetracked into relating it orthographically to 'heir'.

Some years ago, having delivered a well received in-house presentation on the commercial sucess of one of our new pieces of technology, I was asked to repeat it for the company president. The first slide comes up and he says "You've spelled success incorrectly." On the basis that it is as well to be hung for a sheep, or better a wolf, as for a lamb I replied instantly, "I may not be able to spell success sir, but I certainly know how to achieve it, as the next slides will demonstrate."

That quick retort seems incisively on-point.

 

[jack action]

I can't believe nobody mention gauge, too often written as guage.

I also wrote obliviously a lot before it was pointed out to me that it wasn't meaning what I thought it meant ...

 

[sysprog]

I can't believe nobody mention gauge, too often written as guage.

Even if you get that right, you could still be at risk of error when writing about a 'gage' [the spell checker here flags that word] (a thing wagered or pledged or risked, or an act associated with such) -- the word is basal to the word 'engage'.

 

[fresh_42]

I frequently switch letters while typing. This is another problem where the lack of error correcting properties comes into play. The spellchecker doesn't warn me if I mistakenly write $\mathbb{R}$ is a filed.

 

[hmmm27]

... and if you get "gauge" right, you're going to mess up "guard" and "restaurant".

practice/practise, separate/seperate, center/centre, metre/meter...

But, mostly it's other people's spelling that cause difficulty : if I lower the bar and learn to read "internetese", I'm screwing myself over when proofing my own work.

 

[sysprog]

I frequently switch letters while typing. This is another problem where the lack of error correcting properties comes into play. The spellchecker doesn't warn me if I mistakenly write $\mathbb{R}$ is a filed.

Moi aussi regarding the letter switching. Clerical speed and accuracy is not my long suit (forte). The grammar checker in MS Word would wavy-green-underline 'a filed' -- it would do so even if you were to refer correctly to something as 'a filed document', but at least you'd be given notice to look at it again.

 

[fresh_42]

Moi aussi regarding the letter switching. Clerical speed and accuracy is not my long suit (forte). The grammar checker in MS Word would wavy-green-underline 'a filed' -- it would do so even if you were to refer correctly to something as 'a filed document', but at least you'd be given notice to look at it again.

It did it here in chrome as well, but I remember occasions where I didn't use an article with field. There are other words, too, which are valid with switched letters: lots lost, brain brian (the spell checker doesn't check that Brian needs a capital letter).

 

[fresh_42]

I can't believe nobody mention gauge, too often written as guage.

Let me say it with Satchmo:

Don't no much about the French I took, but at least it prevents me from such errors. au, eau, ou, o, gh are no problem. It is only difficult if it is of English origin, since there seem to be no rules.

 

[sysprog]

proofing

Let me say it with Satchmo:

Don't no much about the French I took, but at least it prevents me from such errors. au, eau, ou, o, gh are no problem. It is only difficult if it is of English origin, since there seem to be no rules.

The phrase "don't know much about the French I took" is from Sam Cooke's Wonderful World song, not Louis Armstrong's. (I don't think either of them would mind about that.)

I think that the problems in that regard with English are mainly due to its multiplicity of ancestors.

While German is mostly Germanic, and French is largely Romanic [$\leftarrow$ spellcheck flag for omitting the 't', which I took the liberty of doing in order to avoid using a word that normally means something like having to do with love stories], English before 1066 (the Norman Conquest year) was mostly Germanic, and a hodgepodge of Breton, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Frisian etc., and after 1066 it became strongly influenced by Norman French.

Until the King James Bible was printed, there was very little standardization of spelling.

In my opinion, the closest thing we have today to a set of internationally standard spellings for the English language, is what IBM calls "US English".

 

[sysprog]

It did it here in chrome as well, but I remember occasions where I didn't use an article with field. There are other words, too, which are valid with switched letters: lots lost, brain brian (the spell checker doesn't check that Brian needs a capital letter).

The general problems of ortho-lexico-typo-graphical syntactic parsing, with some semantic processing, are in my view interesting, difficult, and not entirely intractable. In the early '80s a programmer colleague and friend of mine (we were both undergrad students, he was a better programmer, I knew more about language), John Riedl recruited me to assist in presenting a project proposal involving natural language processing to some professors. I asked whether Ken Sayre would be among the professors to whom we'd be presenting. My friend said, alas no, just the Math department. John knew that Prof. Sayre was a very strong AI guy, but was in the Philosophy department. At the time I was in Prof. Sayre's Epistemology class, and I volunteered to pitch the idea to him. John said let's wait and see if we get some support from the Math department first -- they're in charge of the computer. I acquiesced -- it was his project idea; not mine.

When we got to the presentation, with three senior Math Professors in attendance, John made his pitch. The professors quizzed John about some of the technicalities, and he breezed through that. Then they asked him what could this be used for, and John turned to me.

I began by saying that John had already outlined how we could deal with the problem of recognition of parts of speech, and that from there, we could build a more general syntactical parser, and could apply that framework as part of a grammar validator, or later, an interlingual translator. 'Pie in the sky' seemed to be the immediate reactional consensus. I acknowledged that the semantic components of the more general semiotic problems would be daunting, but disagreed, for example, with the postulation that we might be facing an equivalent of a known NP-complete or NP-hard or completely intractable problem.

I argued that we could isolate most of the drudgery work to a rule-based syntactical parser subset, which would consult a disambiguator component when it couldn't determine which meaning of a multi-meaning word was the intended one, and needed that information in order to decide which rule to apply. The machine could present a list of possibilities to the human, and he would select one, and the machine would carry on.

I could see the professors mentally weighing the likely computational resources involved. The verdict was that the project was not without merit, but would probably be too resource-hungry, and so it would not be wholly supported, but we could pursue it in papers for academic credit, but we would be allowed only such access to computational resources as would be necessary to support claims in our papers, and we already had that level of access. John didn't want to go forward under those conditions, so we agreed that we'd keep it pretty much as just a matter for discussion, at least until computational capacity became more abundant.

At the time, the main machine to which we had a share of access was an IBM System/370, and it was fully adequate for all of what we did and most of what we wanted to do. Today, my phone has much more memory and processing capacity than that machine had. Even so, none of my personally-owned machines of today could reproduce its multi-user interactive (time sharing) and concurrent batch processing capabilities, especially in the IO handling areas.

 

[fresh_42]

I frequently use Google Translate if I can buffer a German text. Although not perfect it does an incredible job. It produces a skeleton which saves a lot of typing, because I only have to correct the most terrible mistakes. But within technical contexts the program is really bad. One should think that this would be especially easy, as the variety of correct translations is much smaller. E.g. chess pieces have different names in English and German. We do not say bishop and knight. And although I had a sentence in which chess occurred and thus determined context, the program translated literally instead of knight in this case. The same is true for mathematical names which are different, e.g. we do not say field, or integral domain. On the other hand, if I translate a German Wikipedia page which has formulas the English version has not with the automatic translation feature in chrome, the results are at least readable. It's a terrible English, but one can understand what it is about.

 

[sysprog]

When I'm writing in a language other than English, I like using translators bidirectionally and into third languages to ensure that the to-me-foreign language result adequately conveys my intended meaning. Even though that seems to work rather well, I think it best to have a writing [$\leftarrow$ gerund] that is intended for publication first reviewed by a native speaker of the target language.

 

[fresh_42]

When I'm writing in a language other than English, I like using translators bidirectionally and into third languages to ensure that the to-me-foreign language result adequately conveys my intended meaning. Even though that seems to work rather well, I think it best to have a writing [$\leftarrow$ gerund] that is intended for publication first reviewed by a native speaker of the target language.

This is a good advice, and certainly true. I do this as well from time to time: check whether transitivity leads to the same original statement.

But if someone looks for a proof here on PF and there is only a German or French Wikipedia page, the automatic translator will mostly do. One primarily needs the formulas which are identical and only a few simple words in between. I wonder that people don't switch languages on Wikipedia. It is easy and the entries are not identical. This often gives additional information with basically no time or work to be spent. Furthermore are English and German or French so closely related, that the errors are limited. It's mainly the difference in SPO. This leads to bad English sentences, but it is still understandable. My observation is, that the English Wiki is often more general, and the German has some detailed formulas. There is not always another suitable page available, but often it is.

I would certainly not rely on those automatisms for a publication, but if someone only wants an answer, so what - means I'm usually too lazy to translate it if there is also an automatism available. At times when I had a regular email correspondence with England, I gave the important mails to an English colleague to check them. It are the nuances in meaning and sometimes a different way to express things which a computer hardly can know. Again a nice example how far from context-free natural languages are.

 

[Mark44]

It are the nuances in meaning

Yes, it are.

 

[mathwonk]

This takes me back (again, as I believe I told this story before) to eighth grade when I had a teacher who charged us to generate our own spelling words, by bringing each Monday 10 new words we did not previously know how to spell.

Taking him literally, as a natural phonetic speller, I began a routine of long Sunday afternoons going through the "old blue back speller" trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to find words I could not spell. The result was a list of words like "phthisic", "asafoetida", and "catarrh", which my teacher could not even pronounce.

The only word I encountered on the other students' lists that year which I could not spell was hemorrhage, and the only word I recall that stumped me some 40 years later was "minuscule", which I erroneously connected with miniature rather than minute. Now 65 years later, I have no difficulty in misspelling many words (is it crall or krall, or kral?). Typing them wrong is even easier. (does concierge obey the usual c rule, or do french words get a pass?)

I also spelled "chartreuse" wrong once also in 8th grade, losing first place in a radio broadcast spelling contest, omitting the first e, as well as "victuals" (pronounced "vittles"), but did get "daguerreotype" correct (the radio host may have incorrectly pronounced the second e which of course is silent), since it had occurred in the blue back speller. Of course embarrass and harass were standards learned there as well, and also parallel, etc... thanks for the memories. My hat is well off to any foreigner who can spell English words. I can't even tell a German "A" from a German "G" in early editions of van der Waerden's modern algebra.

 

[hmmm27]

as well as "victuals" (pronounced "vittles")

I learned to spell from reading novels rather than a dictionary, filling in from context and occasionally blipping over a word.

As a result I went, for a decade or two, wondering if "misled" was pronounced "mizzled" or "mild".

 

[fresh_42]

Bartel is pronounced "fun der G Warden" (with an "a" as in garden) and he was Dutch. It is a pity that I never had the chance to meet him, although I knew the lady who typed one of his books.

 

[sysprog]

The surname of Bartel van der Waerden is pronounced "fun der G Warden" (with an "a" as in garden), and he was Dutch. It is a pity that I never had the chance to meet him, although I knew the lady who typed one of his books.

[In the quoted text, for clarity, I added the common spelling of the famous Dutch mathematician's surname, and for conventionality, changed 'which' to 'who' in the reference to the typist lady.]

 

[fresh_42]

[In the quoted text, for clarity, I added the common spelling of the famous Dutch mathematician's surname, and for conventionality, changed 'which' to 'who' in the reference to the typist lady.]

I already had corrected it. That was a translational slip, since we address people by the correspondence of which (welche), whereas "who" doesn't exist as pronoun (at least it is hardly used as such, only as question "wer?") and "die" (the) doesn't exist in English as pronoun. "Welche" (which) is more sophisticated in German than "die", which is usually used: "die Dame, die einige (it actually were some books, not only one) Bücher getippt hat".

(edited for the sake of accuracy)

 

[sysprog]

I already had corrected it. That was a translational slip, since we address people by the correspondence of which (welche), whereas "who" doesn't exist as pronoun and "die" isn't polite in connection with people.

I would have disregarded the pronoun concern, but I had to look up which person (i.e. 'whom') you meant by "Bartel" (that name being a form of 'Bartholemew').

 

[fresh_42]

I would have disregarded the pronoun concern, but I had to look up which person (i.e. 'whom') you meant by "Bartel" (that name being a form of 'Bartholemew').

Thanks for that insight. I only knew the name from van der Waerden and a German idiom: "Jemandem zeigen, wo Barthel den Most holt" = to show someone what is (exactly) what, how something is done; from yiddish Most = money; where the money is.

 

[sysprog]

Looking a bit further into the origins of that idiom, I found that "Barthel" is apparently not a reference to the male given name, but is from the Yiddish word for "crowbar" ("Barthel" ist kein männlicher Vorname, sondern jiddisch für "Brechstange"). [ref: Geolino]

 

[Stephen Tashi]

"Dining" as in "dining room". I often spell it "dinning" and the spell checkers don't object. Is "dinning" is a participle of "din"?

 

[PeroK]

"Dining" as in "dining room". I often spell it "dinning" and the spell checkers don't object. Is "dinning" is a participle of "din"?

Apparently so! It's in Merriam-Webster.

 

[sysprog]

"Dining" as in "dining room". I often spell it "dinning" and the spell checkers don't object. Is "dinning" is a participle of "din"?

Yes, it's a present participle (or gerund) of 'din', which as a verb means making a 'din' (<- nonal form implicit), i.e. making noise -- it's like 'drum' in this regard, e.g. as in 'drumming' it into your boyfriend/girlfriend that 'someone' always wants first choice over who has the remote control device in hand.

 

[mathwonk]

The part about "which" versus "who" interested me as I have wondered why the King James bible has in psalm 121: "...my help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." (for which "which" I myself use "who"!)

 

[DaveC426913]

I always have to double- and triple-check "gauge".

 

[hutchphd]

The part about "which" versus "who" interested me as I have wondered why the King James bible has in psalm 121: "...my help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth." (for which "which" I myself use "who"!)

1 I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
From whence cometh my help.
2 My help cometh from the LORD,
Which made heaven and earth.

Also the "from whence". I'm not Christian but I love this Psalm

 

[DrGreg]

Also the "from whence".

"Whence" means "from where". So "from whence" means "from from where"?

 

[mathwonk]

I think that's ok, as I'm pretty sure David wasn't Christian either.

I think just plain "whence" also means wherefore, or because of which. But you are right that the "from" is redundant, sometimes used but not always, as in Matthew, chap 13, verse 54: "Whence hath this man this wisdom?" meaning roughly I guess: "(from) where does he get the nerve to preach to us?"

 

[hutchphd]

I think that's ok, as I'm pretty sure David wasn't Christian either.

Very good point. But James I was and he had final approval!