I occasionally see “superceed” when the writer means something else.

Problem:
“Superceed” is a misspelled word.

Explanation:
“Superceed” is a misspelling of “supersede” and reflects the combination of the influence of other words (e.g., “succeed”) and an ignorance about the roots of words.

The verb “supersede” literally means to sit upon or above — from “super” (from the Latin “super”: upon or above) and “sede” (from the Latin “sedére”: to sit).

In contrast, the “ceed” in verbs such as “succeed” comes from the Latin “cédere”: to go.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• supersede — 2,780,000 matches
• superceed — 19,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of more than 146:1, which is satisfying to see.

If one can remember that “supersede” literally means to sit above, then one can use the mnemonic trick that there is an ‘s’ in both “sede” and “sit”.

Solution:
“Supersede”