'Wich' Is Which? Top 10 Words That Students Often Misspell In Their Essays

Findings showed that spelling mistakes ranked highest in the types of language errors made by students.

There are a few words that can be tricky to spell, no matter how simple they may be. In fact, you’d be surprised to know that the most commonly confusing words to spell are those that we use everyday.

A recent study by Edubirdie, a professional essay writing service, revealed the most commonly misspelt words in essays submitted to them between 2019 and 2020. These were written by students in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia.

Study Finds Most Confusing Words To Spell By Students

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In Edubirdie’s study, they analysed grammatical mistakes in essays that students sent to the site for editing. They analysed more than 500,000 words in total.

Findings showed that spelling mistakes ranked highest in the types of language errors made by students. Misplaced modifiers and lack of subject-verb agreement were also among the errors that were commonly made.

Top 10 Most Commonly Misspelt Words


Write spelling	Commonly misspelt as
1. Tomorrow	Tommorow
2. Which	Wich
3. Completely	Completly
4. Receive	Recieve
5. Until	Untill
6. Finally	Finaly
7. Successful	Succesful
8. Beginning	Begining
9. Definitely	Definately
10. Government	Goverment

Source: Edubirdie

Reasons For Misspelling Words

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Edubirdie communication director, Avery Morgan, suggests that these errors were made not because writers don’t know the correct spelling but because they’re too focused to notice the mistake. The writer is fully aware of correct grammar, punctuation and spelling but a few confusing words might just have slipped their mind to spell.

“This is perhaps why in so many of the misspelled words the mistake authors are missing double letters, such as ‘finaly’ and ‘finally’,” says Morgan as per Yahoo!News.

To better understand why misspelling such common words happen, here are other reasons behind these common confusing words seen by English language educators:

Forgetting that “I before E except after C”
Secondary school teacher Mr Benjamin Wong suggests that “receive” is commonly misspelt since students often switch I and E when they spell it.
Typos in texting and social media
Mr Wong also says that texting could also be why people nowadays often make mistakes as they would only spell words shorthanded such as “separate” typed as “sep” instead.
Morgan adds that spelling mistakes can also be caused by all the typos we see in social media.
Converting verbs to nouns
English tutor Christabel Hong explains that changes in form can also often be the reason for errors since it involves adding and removing letters.
Mispronunciation
Ms adds that words like “privilege” and “mischievous” are confusing words to spell since they are commonly pronounced wrong.

Is your child making these mistakes too?

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Written by

Ally Villar

English Language Improvementwriting difficultyspellinggrammarlanguage education