According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the most commonly misspelled word is “publicly.”
The most misspelled word
Publicly may be the most commonly misspelled word because it violates a spelling rule in English. Words that end in “ic” get “ally” added to the end (like magic and magically). But public only gets an “ly.” This causes people to often misspell it as “publically.”
It seems like an unlikely word to misspell – or at least misspell most often. But other sources have other words that they believe are the most misspelled.
Other commonly misspelled words
Misspelling words can be hazardous to your success. According to CNBC, “According to one survey, 43% of hiring managers automatically chuck a candidate’s resume if it has spelling errors. Another showed that 79% of recruiters and human resource managers said spelling and grammatical mistakes were the biggest ‘deal breakers’ in job hunting.”
They also gathered grammar experts to alert us to some of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language. These include:
- Accommodate (it’s hard to remember that there are two sets of double letters — “cc” and “mm”)
- Acknowledgment
- Acquire (people often forget the “c”)
- Apparent
- Calendar (really? c’mon, folks!)
- Colleague
- Conscientious
- Consensus
- Entrepreneur
- Experience (people often assume it ends in “ance”)
- Indispensable
- Liaison
- License
- Occurred
- Recommend
- Successful
- Until (seriously?)
Clearly, folks missed a lot of spelling classes in elementary school!
Depending on which source you’re asking, there may be a whole different list of “most commonly misspelled words.”
We all have some easy words we misspell by transposing letters or forgetting a vowel. Maybe we’ve become too reliant on spell checkers (or simply don’t care to get it right). But one thing is for sure, most of us could use a refresher of our 3rd-grade spelling class. — WTF fun facts