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Another kind of typo—informally called an "atomic typo"—is a typo that happens to result in a correctly spelled word that is different from the intended one. Since it is spelled correctly, a simple spellchecker cannot find the mistake. The term was used at least as early as 1995 by Robert Terry. [15] A few illustrative examples include:
The guiding rule should be to include words if they are more likely to be incorrect spellings than correct spellings even if it means that occasionally there will be false positives. Keep in mind some words could be corrected to multiple different possibilities and some are names of brands, songs, or products. These are just the most common.
Use italics when writing about words as words, or letters as letters (to indicate the use–mention distinction). Examples: The term panning is derived from panorama, which was coined in 1787. Deuce means 'two'. (Linguistic glosses go in single quotation marks.) The most common letter in English is e.
Avoid having a rule detect a spelling outside its intended scope (for example, a rule that fixes housa to house must not detect thousand or house). Add word boundaries (\b) to both ends of the regex unless you are matching errors in parts of words or multiple words. Do not expect rules to be applied in the order they appear. Write fast rules:
National varieties of English (for example, American English or British English) differ in vocabulary (elevator vs. lift ), spelling (center vs. centre), and occasionally grammar (see § Plurals, below). Articles such as English plurals and Comparison of American and British English provide information about such differences. The English ...
Search for the misspelled word or words (after the "wikt:"). Fix the misspelling if you're sure you know the correct spelling, and save the article. Don't change compound words (like buckwheat -> buck wheat) unless you know they are wrong (like Whitehouse -> White House for the U.S. president).
This machine-readable version of misspelled words is usually out-of-date compared to the actual listing pages for each of the individual, human-readable lists. (As of Feb. 14, 2020, there are no numbers at all in this machine-readable list, and every letter seems to have missing entries.)
For example, "Johnny Hazzard" is a correctly spelt proper name, even though it looks similar to the word "hazard", and Australia's "Mackerel Beach", named after the type of fish, is sometimes referred to as "Mackeral Beach" in official documents. Some foreign words look like misspellings of English words, but are correctly spelt for that language.