Commonly misspelled English words are words that are often unintentionally misspelled in general writing. A selected list of common words is presented below, under Documented list of common misspellings. Although the word common is subjective depending on the situation, the focus is on general writing, rather than in a specific field. Accepted spellings also vary by country or region, with some rejecting the American or British variants as incorrect for the region.
Within a particular field of study, such as computer graphics, other words might be more common for misspelling, such as “pixel” misspelled as “pixle” (or variants “cesium” and “caesium”). Sometimes words are purposely misspelled, as a form in slang, abbreviations, or in song lyrics, etc.
In general writing, some words are frequently misspelled, such as the incorrect spelling “concensus” for “consensus” found in numerous webpages. Other common misspellings include “equiptment” (for “equipment”), “independant” (for “independent”), “readible” (for readable), or “usible” (for usable or useable).
Unlimited misspellings
Because many words can be extended with prefixes (such as “un-” or “anti-” or “re-“) or suffixes (such as “-ly” or “-ing” or “-ness”), a comprehensive list of words prone to misspelling would contain thousands of variations from combining prefixes or suffixes (or both) added to the root words. To limit the scope to common words, the top 350 words are considered (according to various sources).
- Absence – absense, absentse, abcense, absance
- Acceptable – acceptible
- Accidentally/accidently – accidentaly
- Accommodate – accomodate, accommodate
- Achieve – acheive
- Acknowledge – acknowlege, aknowledge
- Acquaintance – acquaintence, aquaintance
- Acquire – aquire, adquire
- Acquit – aquit
- Acreage – acrage, acerage
- Address – address
- Coming – comming
- Committed – commited, comitted
- Comparison – comparsion
- Concede – conceed
- Congratulate – congradulate
- Conscientious – consciencious
- Conscious – concious, consious
- Consensus – concensus
- Controversy – contraversy
- Coolly – cooly
- Daiquiri – dacquiri, daquiri