Enlglish is an incredibly hard language. We all have a hard time with some words, but we’ve gahtered up some of the hardest-to-spell words in the langauge so you’ve got everything in one place to check in the future! Your welcome.
congradulations
etiqette
embbarrass
bizzarre
commiitttt
restaurateueur
innocsencse
sillhouette
avalance
camoflaughe
cauliflouwuer
woreschestersechire
khohlrhabhi
recomendation
milenial
mispell
rythm
concience
Tags: and yet we’re still writers, spelling, words
I spell for a living, but can I type company right first time? NO. Can I ever type the year without either making it 20015, or 20915, or 2915? ALSO NO.
What is your job?
I’m a subeditor. Or comma-wrangler, as my sister calls me.
I don’t know what this is from but I cannot look away.
It’s from How I Met Your Mother, on Ted’s first day teaching a college course. It’s also possibly the most relatable that character has ever been.
Well, in THAT episode, sure….
#burntedforever
This is my whole life.
I was teaching a class and I forgot how to spell “balloon”. I just thought about it too much and blanked and panicked.
HS kids would be like, “Hey, didn’t you forget to write that on the board?” Me: “No, just remember it use your mind”.
Just cracked up at my desk watching that girl helpfully nod at him
When he said “your mother was in that class, kids.” I just assumed it was her.
Oh, man. Perfect GIF application, right there. Ted Evelyn “No can do’s-ville, babydoll” Mosby.
This is acatlly actshally just too acurate accurate. Congradulations.
I don’t forsee having any occassion to impliment these since my spelling is impeccible. I aprecciate the idea though, and it’s a fun excersize.
edit: Is it too desparate to make a seperate post for these two asshole words?
Defanitely not.
That’s how I pronounce “woreschestersechire.”
My dad always calls it “whats-this-here sauce,” because #dadjokes.
(Meanwhile I remember the day my non-Masshole friends were complaining about how Worcester doesn’t sound at all like it’s spelled and I was sitting there going “Well, DUH.” Good times!) (It’s “WOOster.” Or “Wuzteh” if you’re from the city.)
Or British! The first time I heard an American talking about the sauce I am sorry to say I raised some snooty British eyebrows. Makes sense though, to say it the American way. HOWEVER your dad’s name for it supersedes all previous names and that’s its name now. Congrads, Dadachronistique!
I spent a long trip from NJ to Boston figuring out how Worcester became Wooster…it makes a lot of sense, actually!
Broccoli. Always want to spell it brocolli. Fortunately, I hate the stuff, so don’t often need to write it.
Embarrass and harass are my twin nemeses.
Same. Can’t get embarrass ever on the first try. Just did it there, actually.
I will never spell “commencement” correctly on the first try no matter how many of them I work and it is VERY annoying.
I have a problem with proceed/concede/succeed/recede because they all sound the same and I can’t remember which goes which way.
I believe there was an Encyclopedia Brown mystery where one of the clues was a piece of paper with the sentence “In order to succeed, you must proceed to exceed.” I forget the details, but basically the sentence let them know the person who did it was in the spelling bee because those are the only three words in English that end in “ceed.” Hope this helps.
YES THANK YOU THAT DOES HELP
That reminds me of an Ellery Queen mystery where they knew the suspect was lying about his job because somehow they were talking about words with successive double letters, and the suspect didn’t know that bookkeeper is the only(?) one with three consecutive doubles, even though he claimed to be a bookkeeper himself.
(I would also like to make it known that the second time I wrote bookkeeper up there, I tried to spell it with one k, because wording is hard)
OH! I remember that! It was the plot of a different Encyclopedia Brown mystery, too.
I still have to repeat to myself “S-U-C-C-E-S-S, that’s the way you spell success” every time.
but also precede and proceed
For some reason, I get ‘initiative’ wrong on the first try about 80% of the time, even though it’s a word I have to type out ALL THE TIME in my job.
at least half the time I end up typing “the Untied States”
Bad spellers of the world, untie!
That’s what happened during the US Civil War.
It’s rediculous that I can never remember how to spell “ridiculous”.
Fortunately I don’t work in the medical field, because mine is “antibitotics”. Every. Single. Time. And then I say it out loud to myself and giggle at my stupidity.
Cantelope. Cantalope? Canteloupe? That melon. No, not the honeydew, the other one.
Bannana? Bananna? The yellow one.
Ah, see I never have problems with that, because of Hollaback (because this shit is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s). Thanks, Gwen Stefani!
I actually have to recite that in my head sometimes when I forget how to spell banana.
My mother once confessed that she lived in fear of being asked to write a reference for someone and having to spell ‘conscientious.’
“Conshi– conse– thoughtful.”
I had to write a paper for my psychology of personality class. The five main personality dimensions are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.
It was like one of those pictures for kids where you’re supposed to spot all the wrongly drawn details. How many spelling traps can YOU find?
I’m a good speller, but THE TYPOS
Openess, Consc??uurgh, Extroversion, Agreebleness, Neurotisicm
Opennes, Conscent- Concentius-, Consentiosness? Conscentosnessessess, Extr- HEY there’s an A??, Agreeabelness, Neroticism
Necroticism
Whatever
Accommodate. I always try to spell it “acommodate” first, and then “accomodate” because my mind does not believe the word is so long it should have two sets of double letters.
I frequently write reports referring to a need for accommodations. This gets old.
ME TOOOOOOOOOO.
If it helps – I learned this by being told that it’s two c’s and two m’s because you have to accommodate all the letters.
I am in fear that there is a typo somewhere in this comment, but hitting submit anyhow.
Every time! I type “accomodate” every single time and am enraged and baffled anew by the red line. NO SPELLCHECK UR WRONG.
Honestly I would be more involved in online feminist discussions if I could spell “priveledge.” I mean privilige. Privelege?
*actually I wouldn’t, but that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
Just call it ‘priv’ all the time. Refuse to believe it makes you sound like a prat. Commit.
I can only remember by saying ‘unchecked priVILEge can be vile’. Changed my life.
Now all I need is someone to teach me to write ‘available/avaliable’. I genuinelly don’t remember where the ‘I’ goes!
Lavender and calendar. Why is one ER and one AR?
(Also, I type graduated gradauted EVERY time for some reason. And I work in grad school admissions so I type that word a lot.)
Manouevre. Maneouvre? Manueuouvre???
“Awknowlege”… sp??
long long long ago, I realized that I could remember how to spell “tomorrow” because of the phrase “on the morrow.”
I felt like a freakin genius.
except, child me never anticipated that I’d just created a pattern that would last forever. I cannot spell tomorrow EVER without thinking about this. Similar to ‘sup, A Rat?’ – separate and the many other goofy things i made up along the way.
Years ago I ran across a mnemonic-style thing for spelling “occurred,” which went “What was the senorita’s comment to the red-headed cowboy? Oh, si, si, you are red!” And now I think this every single time. I CANNOT UN-THINK THIS.
oh good god. i can only hope i am far enough from the sponge-like brains of childhood to forget this immediately, but i understand your pain.
and don’t get me started on dumb math tricks. some are musical! and they will be there forever!
Ex equals negative bee, plus or minus the squaaare root of bee squared minus four aye see, all over two aye!
I don’t imagine I will ever have to use the quadratic equation ever again, but there it is!
When I was a small child, we watched a video about times tables in school which had cartoon soldiers chanting the two times table, and I now find it impossible to think of it (when, for example, counting pairs of things) without getting it in my head. I don’t need assistance to remember the two times table! It’s just all the even numbers!
“necessary has a collar and two socks” GOOD FOR HIM NOW GET OUT OF MY BRAIN
I learned all the multiplication tables by heart, except 9. To this day it’s the only one I don’t know. Why? Because I learned a helpful shortcut.
Hold up your hands and stare at your row of 10 fingers. Now, if you want to multiplicate 7*9, fold down the 7th finger from the left (right hand index finger). You see 6 fingers to the left of it and 3 to the right. 7*9 is 63.
It works. It works so well that I 17 years later still have to slightly bend my finger when I want to multiply by 9, and then I know the answer even if I can’t see my hands. But if I had to keep my fingers completely straight, I’d have no idea.
That’s so cool, and I am very sad that I will probably forget this trick by the end of the day.
The 9 times table is my favourite, because it has a pattern! The first digit goes up while the second digit goes down:
09
18
27
36
45
etc!
…I also like 11.
Wed. Nes. Day. Still to this day, I have to think it out.
To. Get. Her. is the same.
It becomes exhausting. It is like this nerve jerk reaction. Like Every Time someone looks at the partially cloudy sky and asks me if I think it is going to rain and I have to think this entire sentence to myself: “My great-grandmother used to say as long as there was enough clear sky to make a cat a pair of pajamas it wouldn’t rain.” Waht? I mean she never used to say that to me. This is just what my mom would tell me. This is second-hand folksie-ism and I don’t want it in my head any more.
fucking Wed. Nes. Day. seriously.
the cat pajamas thing is charming, i mean, i’m sorry it’s in your head forever, but I’m happy you shared.
“Colloquium”.
Seriously. No excuse for that word.
“Silhouette” kicked me out of the 7th grade spelling bee, and because I can never let go of things, I feel a lot better seeing it here.
I blame a teacher’s Texas accent for kicking me out of the spelling bee. The word was “inferential,” which she pronounced “enferential.” Being crappy at studying, but pretty good at intuitively spelling words from their sound, even when I wasn’t familiar with them, I hung on for a few rounds of the bee, but was defeated by that word in that accent. I’m still kicking myself for not asking them to use it in a sentence, from which I’d probably have realized she meant a word related to “infer.” I wouldn’t have won the bee, but I might have placed. Instead, I came in 12th.
(I’m a Texas native, too, but like most urban Texans, I don’t *sound* stereotypically Texan.)
My word was occlusion, and the reader pronounced it very clearly as “ah-cclusion,” so I, also being a good intuitive speller and not interested in studying, spelled it acclusion and tied with like four other people for seventh place. If I’d spelled that one, I would have made it to third place at least.
Yes! I (also urban Texan) lost a bee on the word “gubernatorial” because the official’s accent lost the r out of the “ber” syllable. Gubanatorial.
… to be fair, that is also how I pronounce that word. But not if I were reading it officially for a spelling bee! I would ENUNCIATE!
Man now I’m totally convinced I spelled “enunciate” wrong. That can’t be right, can it? It looks weird.
Augh, same experience but transplanted to southern CA. “Nippeeng?” “Can you use it in a sentence?” “The weather is nippeeng.” [Well, Jack Frost, and the nipping, yeah, so:] “N-I-P-P-I-N-G.” “Sorry, you’re eliminated.”
BECAUSE YOU CANNOT PRONOUNCE “NIPPY,” YOU WORTHLESS ADULT, AND WHY IS THAT A SPELLING BEE WORD IN THE FIRST PLACE? I’m still mad.
committment
mabye
aggh dammit MABYE
YES to committment
Maintenance is my enemy. (And embarrass. but everybody hates embarrass)
I lost the spelling bee in eighth grade on the word etiquette. I knew how to spell it–it’s just the one time in my entire life that I have stuttered. “E-T-I-Q-U-E-T-T-T…oh crap.”
And it is not at all helpful that in May and June, all the graduation cards come out with the same “CON-GRAD-ULATIONS!” pun.
An annoying coworker once told me “there is A RAT in separate” and now I can’t write/type separate without hearing her smug, nasal, lecturing tones.
Also, cinnamon is impossible.
Exercise. Not even bothering to work on remembering it now that I have google searched it to spell it right. Done with it.
Excersize
For some reason I’m terrible at spelling guarantee right the first time I try. I almost always use y instead of ee. Sometimes I forget the u.
I’m a smart person, I swear.
caribbean and mediterranean!
When I was young I was normally fine, except I could NEVER EVER get “friend” right. I always, always, always wanted to spell it “freind”, and I have no idea why.
I read a book sometime in elementary school that reminded me that a friEND stays with you to the END, and I still think about that when I write the word.
I think the similar “friend ends in end” is eventually how I trained myself to spell it right. Before learning that I just got an endless stream of “I before E” which I could tell was CLEARLY untrue and therefore, entirely unhelpful.
Mr. Rogers had a song that was about friends and there was one part of the song that spelled it out “F-R-I-E-N-D” and to this day whenever I spell the word I sing that part of the song in my head.
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uocHKmdCOvc (Having just watched that for the first time since I was very little holy crap does that bring back memories)
i always thought about fry-end, like the ends of fries
When I was looking (desperately) for a museum job, I was sending out tons and tons of cover letters and applications – so the result of this was when I would begin to type any word with the first two letters of “mu-“, my fingers would automatically finish it to make “museum”. This would make me irrationally sad every. single. time.
OH GOD I DO THIS TOO. Almost three years out of the museum world, and this still happens and I fear I will never not do this, to my dying day.
I feel like I used to have decent spelling, but spell check has utterly ruined me. Now I often second guess myself even if I spell something correctly.
architetct
I lost the spelling bee in 4th grade over the word “prairie.” Forgot the extra “i” after “a.” I still hate the word.
Caffeine. Why is it not caffiene? I BEFORE E EXCEPT AFTER C LIED.
Also I have a tendency to type my own last name instead of “machine” because they start similarly.
Or when sounding like “A,” as in Neighbor and Caff-ayne.
But there IS a C before it. Look, there it is, right at the beginning. You can’t miss it.
Decision. Always, every time. Also disappointment’s one s (instead of two which feeeeelllsss right) just makes the word live up to itself, every time I have to spell it out.
Words ending in -ary and -ery. Monastary? Monastery? Cemetary? Cemetery? Who knows?
and then there’s the stationary/stationery thing. THEY MEAN TWO DIFFERENT THINGS WHY
It might be more of a British-Australian thing, but the mnemonic we were taught for this one was to think of “stationer” or “stationer’s”, i.e. the slightly old-fashioned word that’s still sometimes used here in Australia for a shop that sells stationery. (It works for confectionery too!)
Way my mother taught me to remember the difference: e for envelope, a for “on your arse”. Never get it wrong again!
I struggle with words ending -ant or -ent. I like to think I am good at spelling (note: initially typed “sepelling”), but can I remember which ending to use? Can I hell.
I haven’t been able to spell my initials (DAW) correctly on the first try ever since I started having to type “NASDAQ” for my job on a regular basis. My own initials.
I have to use the word documentaion, documetnation, domcuetation ugggh whatever like multiple times a day at work :/
This whole comment thread is hurting my brain, I know everything is misspelled but I have no idea how to mentally correct it.
I work in translation and me and my friend have an ongoing joke about how easy it is to misspell ‘wordcount’ as ‘wordocunt’. One of my colleagues did it in a client meeting the other day on a big screen in front of the client and I SO NEARLY LOST IT.
My office files a lot of documents in King County Superior Court, and I have to watch myself very closely to make sure I don’t drop the “o” in County.
Necessary. I have the hardest time with that one.
Every time I use that word I have to remember it by saying “Never Eat Cake, Eat Salami Sandwiches…” I forget the rest, but that gets me through the tricky part.
Eat Salmon Sandwiches And Remain Young!
Ooh I know one for that!
It is necessary for a shirt to have one collar (one C) and two sleeves (two S’s).
Definitely. Students keep spelling it ‘definately’ and then spellcheck fixes it to ‘defiantly.’ You get sentences like ‘I defiantly enjoyed this book’ and they make me unreasonably happy.
I’m stymied by bouquet and sphynx/sphinx – both of which I have to use at work with frequency! (don’t let this mislead you into thinking my job is an adventure by any means)
I think my favorite is definatly, which Word auto-corrects to defiantly. When I worked as a tutor, I would see a lot of papers like “the author defiantly made a good point in this essay.”
DON’T EVEN TALK TO ME ABOUT “rythm” — I worked at a dance studio called the Rythym Factory — look, there it is, I misspelled it again, do you know how embarrassing (GOT THAT ONE) it is to not be able to spell the name of the place you work at?!
The best thing I learned at university was from another student in my first year: Rhythm Has Your Two Hips Moving. Never get it wrong again!
Every time I go to a doctor’s office for the first time, I have to look up how to spell penicillin and acetaminophen (also had to look them up to spell them here) before I go. I spell them wrong differently every time, and am now unreasonably worried that everyone is laughing at me.
I used to spell congratulations wrong, but then I got so obsessed with Rupaul’s Drag Race that I automatically type AND SAY “condragulations” instead and I’ve just decided to embrace that. Condragulations to me!
My hangups are all grammar-related. I may never, at this point, get the hang of was/were or lay/lie. *hangs head*
Oh man, lay/lie will get me every time. And I was a writing teacher. *also hangs head*
Accomodations. I use this word daily in emails and still never want to put an extra m.
lisence. license?
every damn time.
EVERY TIME
(Liscence lisense licence liscense) lisence will forever be my downfall. Liscence seems right! Why is it not spelled like “scents” or “sense”?
‘Rhythm’ got me out of a spelling bee when I wasn’t thinking carefully about the easy words, which led me to hate spelling bees, the word, and myself. Since I remember this incident so clearly, I must not have gotten over it.
(Note: the winning word at the school level was ‘trierarchy’.)
Many, many of these plus “browswer” – every SINGLE time, and I type that word a LOT.
Sod’s law would say I should have gotten it right and had to make it wrong, but nah, the error has become hardwired.
ETA. I have a terror of my recurring “account” typo…the one that makes the last 4 letters a word you do not wish to send in an email lest you be hauled over all sorts of scalding-hot censure coals.
Desparately.
My own name. DON’T JUDGE.
Change it to your preferred version!
I feel such shame whenever I spell competent wrong, especially on a resume or something.
I was on a committee that was interviewing candidates for an editing position and one of the candidates had listed proofreading under her “stregnths.” I guess not.
Awkward. It’s definitely the most awkward of words for me.
Also anything with multiple doubled consonants, because they often have surprise single consonants, and it’s upsetting.
I really enjoy obsess/possess. Because the single S is /s/ and the double S is /z/. Mwahaha.
Fusha. Fushia. Fuschia. Goddammit, bright pink.
Oh come now this is an eggzageration accross the bored.
My own name Catherein. And any word that is similar in French. Apartment/appartement ?? Carott/carrotts/carrots/carrottes ??
Idiosyncrycysycysy
I can outspell most anyone, but that word is my personal Kryptonite.
When I was a child someone told me that the way to remember the spelling of ‘necessary’ was Never Eat Cake Eat Salmon Sandwiches And Remain Young, and now it’s so ingrained in my brain that I can’t help mentally saying it super-fast on autopilot any time I have to write or type the word. ‘No, really, that won’t be nevereatcakeeatsalmonsandwichesandremainyoung, I can just sort it out tomorrow morning.’
i am 36 years old and it’s still 30/70 that i’ll spell “restaraunt” correctly.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISCRETE AND DISCREET KILLS ME EVERY TIME.
There, there: at least you know there is a difference. On the Internet, that probably puts you in the 1%.
Defanitely not.
YESSSSS. Also I will be typing something and only realize after three paragraphs that I have interspersed bits of the dialogue from whatever I'm watching on TV in the background.
I was on a committee that was interviewing candidates for an editing position and one of the candidates had listed proofreading under her "stregnths." I guess not.
The one I picked up from my grandma was how to spell business: when you run one, you'll be "busi". Also, despite having never actually seen the cartoon my mom got it from, I know how to spell encyclopedia because of an old Jiminy Cricket diddy from some educational Disney cartoon (or so she claimed), which I actually just picked up from her teaching it to me. Like you, I recite it every time I need to spell encyclopedia.
(I remember restaurant because they have 'taurs and ants in them)
“awkward” (it’s spelled like it is: awkwardly!)