Most Often Misspelled English Word

Most Often Misspelled English Word

Here's a fun game for all you word geeks: What is the most frequently misspelled word?(And, no, it's not "misspelled," although that would be funny if it were.)

It's "supersede."

That's the word from Collins Dictionaries of Britain, which admittedly has made this pronouncement based only on an estimation. Still, the company says "supersede" is misspelled one out of every 10 times it is used because many other words with phonetically similar endings, such as "intercede" and "precede," are spelled with the letter "c" instead of "s," reports The Daily Telegraph.

Using a software program that analyzed thousands of documents on the Internet, including published books, blogs and news articles, the Collins Dictionaries researchers were able to identify "supersede" as the most misspelled word.

Runners-up are:

* conscience
* indict
* foreign
* mortgage
* phlegm

These are challenging to writers since the spelling of each is different from their phonetic pronunciations.

"The real spelling problems occur when people have (learned) the rules or have a bit of knowledge, but then make mistakes in how they apply this," Ian Brookes, the managing editor of dictionaries at Collins, told the Telegraph.