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The following list, of about 350 words, is based on documented lists [4] [10] of the top 100, 200, or 400 [3] most commonly misspelled words in all variants of the English language, rather than listing every conceivable misspelled word. Some words are followed by examples of misspellings:
It is sometimes used incorrectly to mean to betray something hidden. [25] bemused. To be bemused is to be perplexed or bewildered; however, it is commonly used incorrectly in place of amused. bisect and dissect. Bisect means "to cut into two"; dissect means "to cut apart", both literally and figuratively.
can back up [verb]) (can be) (can black out [verb]) (can breathe [verb]) (can check out [verb]) (can play back [verb]) (can set up [verb]) (can try out [verb])
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.
These words are related to a particular genre of music (hint: they deal with "names" that are spelled a little differently). Related: 300 Trivia Questions and Answers to Jumpstart Your Fun Game Night.
This machine-readable version of misspelled words is usually out-of-date compared to the actual listing pages for each of the individual, human-readable lists.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.)
Excluded are the numerous spellings which fail to make the pronunciation obvious without actually being at odds with convention: for example, the pronunciation / s k ə ˈ n ɛ k t ə d i / [1] [2] of Schenectady is not immediately obvious, but neither is it counterintuitive.
Spell checkers can use approximate string matching algorithms such as Levenshtein distance to find correct spellings of misspelled words. [1] An alternative type of spell checker uses solely statistical information, such as n-grams, to recognize errors instead of correctly-spelled words. This approach usually requires a lot of effort to obtain ...