Common Words That Trip Up Even the Best Spellers

If you’ve ever watched the Scripps National Spelling Bee, you’ve probably been stunned by the competitors’ abilities to spell words such as “bromocriptine” and “psammophile.” But terms like those are specifically chosen to pose a challenge; the average person won’t encounter them in everyday life. That said, there are many more familiar words that also confuse people — even those who claim to be great spellers. So before you type out that next text or email, make sure you know these seven words that often prove tough to spell.

If you’re talking about something becoming a liquid, you might think to spell the verb as “liquify.” After all, the word “liquid” doesn’t have an “e” in it, and many other words that end in “-fy” have an “i” preceding that suffix (e.g., “clarify,” “stupify,” “justify,” etc.). “Liquify” is technically an acceptable variant (likely due to the sheer number of people who spell it that way), but the correct and more common spelling is actually “liquefy.” The “e” comes from its root in the Old French liquefier.

“Minuscule” describes something extremely small or miniature, so it’s not unreasonable that so many people spell it as “miniscule.” However, the correct spelling isn’t about the object being mini so much as it is about the object being of a lesser size than other objects. The word is derived from the Latin minuscula, which is a diminutive form of the word minus, meaning “less.”

A genius may very well be ingenious, which means they are “showing an unusual aptitude for discovering, inventing, or contriving.” But the spelling of “genius” doesn’t translate to the spelling of “ingenious,” which has an “o” when spelled properly. This letter comes from the fact that “ingenious” is derived from the Latin ingeniosus, a term that means “full of intellect.” “Genius” comes from a different Latin root, gignere, meaning “to beget.” 

It’s a bit of grammatical irony that people often misspell “misspell” as “mispell.” The correct spelling has a double “s” because the word combines the prefix “mis-,” meaning “bad,” with “-spell,” meaning “write or say the letters of.”

“Sacrilegious” means “showing a lack of proper respect for a sacred person, place, or object.” The main issue that spellers encounter with this word is assuming it has a direct tie to religion and writing it as “sacreligious.” While religious locations and objects can be — and often are — sacred, the noun form, “sacrilege,” is derived from the Latin sacrilegium, or “a stealing of sacred things.”

What do the words “chimpanze,” “gorrilla,” and “orangutang” have in common? They’re all spelled wrong, with the latter being perhaps the most common error of the (banana) bunch. The correctly spelled word “orangutan” is of Malay origin, a combination of orang, meaning “man,” and hutan, meaning “forest.” (The other two words are correctly spelled as “chimpanzee” and “gorilla.”)

The reason so many tack on an extra “g” to the end of “orangutan” has to do with a linguistic concept known as agreement by correspondence. This is a phonological phenomenon where words are more likely to assimilate into a different language if they have similar or rhyming sounds. In this case, English speakers were predisposed to saying or writing “orangutang” because of its singsongy nature, even though the correct spelling has always been “orangutan.”

We all know the cruciferous green vegetable hated by children across the country (and notoriously by President George H.W. Bush). But while some folks hate its taste, others hate having to spell the word. The correct spelling is “broccoli” — not “broccolli” or “brocolli.” The reason it has two “c’s” and one “l” is that it comes to us from Italian, where broccoli is a plural form of broccolo, meaning “a sprout.”