[ Home | Lab | New Students | Courses | Research | Publications | Activities ]

Spellings and Misspellings

One would think it would be unnecessary to write anything about spellings, but I have noticed an increasing number of odd spellings -- clearly many people refuse to run a spell-checker. The following are some words that I have seen spelled creatively.

Words Often Misspelled

  1. Ambiguous
  2. Commitment and committed
  3. Occurrence and occurred
  4. Omit and, especially, omitted
  5. Opportunity
  6. Pseudo (mostly a prefix)
  7. Referrer (enshrined in the HTTP standard as referer (sic))
  8. Succinct
  9. Supersede
  10. Weird

Nonwords and Such

  1. Ad hoc is not to be hyphenated
  2. Adverse, when you mean averse
  3. Advice when you mean advise or vice versa
  4. Aide when you mean aid or vice versa
  5. Alongwith
  6. Alot
  7. Alright
  8. Atleast
  9. Bottleneck is a word: don't split it
  10. Can not: should be cannot
  11. Conjuncting is not a word; perhaps you mean conjoining
  12. Cost, when you mean price—the difference is critical: it is called profit :-)
  13. Criteria is plural
  14. Frame work: should be framework
  15. Id or id: should be ID or identifier, unless you have Freudian psychoanalysis in mind
  16. Lead, when you mean led, or the other way around
  17. Loose, when you mean lose, or the other way around
  18. Middleman is a word: don't split it
  19. Onto is not a word, except as a kind of function
  20. Parallely is not a word; perhaps you mean "in parallel"?
  21. Phenomena is plural
  22. Righteous, when you mean right, or the other way around
  23. Thereby, when you mean therefore
  24. Throughout is a word: don't split it
  25. Updation is not a word, although insertion and deletion are
  26. Uptil
  27. Upto
  28. Utilize: use "use" instead

Never in the Plural

Or even singular for that matter. These are mass nouns, which means you shouldn't be attempting constructions such as "a software" or "three softwares". You can say "a software module" or "three software modules", however.

  1. Advice
  2. Code (to mean software modules; never to be used in the singular either, for that matter)
  3. Evidence
  4. Information
  5. Software
  6. People (if you mean persons or users)
  7. Research—you don't do researches (Sherlock Holmes did and Henri Poincare did, but times have changed)