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This is a list of English words that are thought to be commonly misused. It is meant to include only words whose misuse is deprecated by most usage writers, editors, and professional grammarians defining the norms of Standard English.
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.
This list does not include place names in the United Kingdom or the United States, or places following spelling conventions of non-English languages. For UK place names, see List of irregularly spelled places in the United Kingdom. For US place names, see List of irregularly spelled places in the United States.
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.
Not all words in this list are acceptable in Scrabble tournament games. Scrabble tournaments around the world use their own sets of words from selected dictionaries that might not contain all the words listed here. Qi is the most commonly played word in Scrabble tournaments, [10] and was added to the official North American word list in 2006. [11]
The word "inflammable" can be derived by two different constructions, both following standard rules of English grammar: appending the suffix -able to the word inflame creates a word meaning "able to be inflamed", while adding the prefix in-to the word flammable creates a word meaning "not flammable".
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom; List of British words not widely used in the United States; List of South African English regionalisms; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: A–L; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z
A aggravate – Some have argued that this word should not be used in the sense of "to annoy" or "to oppress", but only to mean "to make worse". According to AHDI, the use of "aggravate" as "annoy" occurs in English as far back as the 17th century. In Latin, from which the word was borrowed, both meanings were used. Sixty-eight percent of AHD4's usage panel approves of its use in "It's the ...