Common Spelling Mistakes

Wonderful though the English language is, it's got some seriously annoying drawbacks. These are three of them.

Homonym - words that sound the same, but have different meanings and are spelled differently.

• Red vs. read
• Great vs. grate
• Bear vs. bare
• Buy vs. bye vs. by
• There vs. their vs. they're - pay special attention to these. EVERYONE messes these up sometimes, myself included!

Homophones - words that sound the same, but mean different things and may or may not be spelled the same.

• Pear vs. pair
• Knight vs. night
• Lead vs. led
• Read vs. reed
• Leads vs. Leeds
• Generation vs. generation

And then there are...

Homographs - words that are spelled the same but have different meanings and sound different

• Read vs. read
• Lead vs. lead - this is one of the most common spelling mistakes I see, because it is one of the dumbest things in the language. There's lead (i.e. to be the head of a group) vs. lead (the core of old pencils). The past tense of "lead" is "led", as you know, but "led" is then pronounced the same way as the substance! AAAAUGH! People are trying to say something like "General Brock led his troops", but they end up writing "General Brock lead his troops". Sound the same, very different meanings. LED is correct, LEAD is wrong. The same thing happens with read and read.
• Live vs. live

And THEN, because it wasn't confusing enough, these terms overlap! There are more linguistic nightmares besides this one, but these three lead to a lot of common mistakes.

Other annoying words that are commonly misspelled are:

• High school (two words, not one)
• Through vs. thorough
• Were vs. where
• Then vs. than (I'll do an post on that some day)
• There vs. their vs. they're (EVERYONE messes this up sometimes, including me)
• From vs. form
• Every day (depends on the context; if you mean to say something like "Walks to the park were an everyday occurrence", one word is correct. If you're saying something like "I walk to the park every day", two words is correct.)
• Any way (the same problem as above; "Anyway, I thought that was fun" vs. "Is there any way that that could have been fun?")

Do your best to familiarise yourself with these annoying linguistic rules, because they're the causes of some of the most common errors. You'll even come across them in published work. Do your best to find these in your own work and correct them before you pass it on to your editor/prof/teacher/boss/whoever.

Warning: you will start to notice these mistakes everywhere else, and if you're like me, it will annoy you, so I apologise for that.