Misspellings

“… as seemless as possible.”

Adjectives, Misspellings

I saw this in an email message from a new supervisor of a department of employees.

Problem:
The word “seemless” is nonsensical.

Explanation:
The supervisor sent a “Good Morning!” email message to the employees in an existing department to which he had just been assigned.

He was trying to tell them that the transition from the previous supervisor to him would be smooth — that effectively it would have no seams.

That gives us the solution.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “seamless” — 33,700,000 matches
  • “seemless” — 771,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “seamless” over “seemless” by a ratio of 43.7:1 — good, but not great, especially given the nearly one million matches for the misspelled word.

Solution:
“… as seamless as possible.”

“Dutties”

Misspellings, Nouns

My wife saw this on a sign in a high-school attendance office.

Problem:
The noun is misspelled.

Explanation:
The sign directed the student assistants in the office to pay attention to their responsibilities.

You might have to say this aloud a few times to get it.

The sign writer meant “Duties” when she wrote “Dutties” instead.

I believe that the writer saw nothing wrong with the misspelling, given that “Dutties” was in a one-inch font on the sign.

What’s sad is that this appeared on an official sign in a high school. Either nobody saw the misspelled word, or nobody had the nerve to tell someone in the attendance office about it.

Solution:
“Duties”

“Accessable”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings

I saw this in a PowerPoint document.

Problem:
This adjective is misspelled.

Explanation:
I believe that the misspelling of the adjective “accessible” is mostly due to the common mispronunciation — as “accessable” — of that adjective.

Other adjectives that use “ible” instead of “able” include “visible” and “horrible”.

The suffix “ible” is a variation of the suffix “able”; most people use memorization to know which suffix to use.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks to avoid hyphenated forms) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “accessible” — 130,000,000 matches
  • “accessable” — 2,170,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 59.9:1, which is good, but the fact that the Web contains more than two million instances of “accessable” is disappointing.

Solution:
“Accessible”