The five most commonly misspelt words in the English language

Number 5:

'Bureaucracy', comes in at fifth place, most likely due to the number of vowels.

I remember it by means of a silly story.

You are going to buy a computer game when a bur (an irritating hooked seed) gets stuck on you. Unfortunately the game is made by ea (the most hated games company in the US) and when u get back home to play it the DMA drives you cracy.

Number 4:

‘Manoeuvre,' comes in at fourth place, due to the proximity of the 'O' and 'E' to each other.

Luckily for you I haven’t come up with a silly story for this word yet. Instead, I prefer to spit the word between the problematic 'O' and 'E.' This gives us ‘mano’ and ‘euvre,’ which are easier to remember.

Number 3:

'Indict', sneaks in at third place, commonly misspelled 'indite.’

The word ‘indict,’ comes to us from the Medieval Latin indicto, but fear not there is a great little mnemonic to help you remember the correct spelling.

He lived in the suburbs but his crimes were committed in di city.

Number 2:

'Sacrilegious', in second place leaves often leaves me confused over whether it has an 'E' or 'I' in the middle.

Commonly misspelt sacreligious, a quick and dirty trick to remember that the ‘E’ comes in the middle of this word is to recall “I before e except after c.” while this rule not being applied correctly here it will help remind you that the “I” comes first.

Number 1:

'Definitely' is the most the commonly misspelt word in the English language, due to people spelling it phonetically as ‘Definately.’

 

There is definitely no ‘a’ in word definite.

 

 

 

Sources:

Forbes 4 September 2012

The Telegraph 15 Jun 2009

OnePoll.com in 2009