Top Spelling Blunders

Increase Your Credibility by Watching Out for These Commonly Misspelled Words

Grab your dictionaries and flip on your spell-checkers, because we are in for one exciting ride! We recently collected the most common spelling mistakes even the most credible expert authors make.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will present these pesky misspellings to you in order to help you maintain your credibility and build confidence in your writing skills. Without further ado, we give you: The Top 5 Spelling Blunders!

"loosing"

Loosing is the number one, most prevailing spelling blunder! It often occurs when the author intended to use the present participle of the word lose, as in losing weight and mistakenly adds a second o. The root of this blunder stems from the confusion between the words: lose and loose.

Here's the difference: Lose means loss and loose means something is, or has been, released (or something not firmly held in place).

Example: Sam tightened his loose belt after losing weight.

Key: What do winning and losing have in common? Both have only two vowels (winning = ii, losing = oi).

"todays"

Today can be defined as in the course of present time or this present time. The word today can be used as an adverb (qualifies or modifies an adjective) or a noun (person, place or thing). For the sake of brevity, we are going to concentrate on the noun: today.

Here's our issue with todays: it is a noun, sorely missing its good old friend the apostrophe. In order to form the possessive form of a singular noun, no matter what the last consonant is of the noun, you must always add an 's. To do otherwise, you will end up with the plural form of the noun (e.g. dog's vs. dogs, cat's vs. cats, etc.)

Example: John was featured in today's newspaper!

Key: If you state todays, you are essentially stating many present time, which would suggest a bend in the space-time continuum - present time overlapping present time... To fix this, simply add the apostrophe before the s: today's.

"everytime"

Unless you are referring to the Britney Spears pop song "Everytime", every and time should be written as two separate words. The confusion often occurs when writers think about compound words, such as everywhere. Compound words take on a whole new meaning than if they were separated. For instance, everywhere (all places) = every (each, all, any) where (place or position).

Example: Every time you publish an article, your exposure increases.

Key: Everyone, everywhere, should add a space every time.

"aircrafts"

Here's the deal with aircrafts: Whether it be singular or plural, the word aircraft is spelled the same way. Similar words include: moose, fish, and species.

Example: The aircraft are positioned on the carrier. Please watch your step when entering the aircraft.

Key: The pilot of the aircraft won't land when other aircraft are on the runway.

Alternately, this issue with aircrafts may be similar to our previously discussed issue of the possessive form: todays vs. today's.

Example: Please watch your step when descending the aircraft's staircase.

"ect"

No "ifs, ands, or buts," ect is not the correct abbreviation for et cetera. Et Cetera is a Latin expression meaning and so forth or and other things. Its correct abbreviation is etc.

Example: Writing supplies may include pens, pencils, paper, etc.

Key: Don't forget to pack eggplant, carrots, tomatoes, etc. in your lunch.

There you have it - the top 5 most common spelling blunders!