People can be too clever to spell
29th August 2008
And too clever to get it right when correcting others, it would seem.
Researchers at Collins Dictionaries found that the most commonly misspelt word was supersede – being wrong on one in ten occasions. The problem arises because people use their knowledge of the words that have a phonetically similar ending, like intercede, precede or cede, from the Latin cedere – to yield. They then wrongly assume that supersede is spelt with a ‘c’.
The truth is that “supercede” is a perfectly good word and has a slightly different meaning than “supersede”; the problem is that people don’t appreciate, and therefore don’t exploit, such precise shades of meaning.