Misspellings

“Superceed”

Misspellings, Verbs

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”

“ARTIC FRONT”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Devolution toward Simpler, Misspellings

I saw this in a headline on the Weather Channel.

Problem:
The adjective is misspelled.

Explanation:
The correct spelling of the adjective is “arctic”.

Wondering about the frequency of the misspelling of “arctic”, I searched Google separately for each of “artic front” and “arctic front” with the quotation marks included in each search. I got about 3,110 matches for the former and about 44,300 matches for the latter. That’s a dominance ratio of more than 14:1 in favor of the correct spelling.

I then searched Google for each of “artic” and “arctic” (with no quotation marks necessary for the searches). I got approximately 11,300,000 matches for the misspelled adjective(!) and approximately 63,000,000 matches for the correctly spelled adjective. That’s a dominance ratio of less than 5.6:1 in favor of the correct spelling.

That’s equivalent to saying that more than fifteen percent of all occurrences of this adjective on the Web are misspelled! Shame on the Weather Channel for having at least one staff member in that 15%. The adjective “arctic” is a weather term, after all!

I believe that the misspelling of “arctic” as “artic” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis. It’s simpler to say “artic” than to say “arctic” (given that it takes concentration to say the hard “c” sound immediately before the “t” sound), and speech has a spillover effect into spelling.

Solution:
“ARCTIC FRONT”

“ingenius products”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a blogger’s post.

Problem:
The word “ingenius” is a misspelling of an adjective.

Explanation:
Try to look up “ingenius” at Dictionary.com. What you’ll find is “No results found for ingenius.” and a “Did you mean … ?” question.

The correct spelling of the adjective is “ingenious”. The fragment gen in the adjective “ingenious” is the base of the verb gignere, which means to bring into being.

In contrast, the English noun “genius” is from the Latin word genius, which means talent, spirit, or guardian deity.

So a “genius” is someone who is talented, whereas something that is “ingenious” is characterized by originality of invention. There is no such word (except as a brand name) with the spelling “ingenius”.

Solution:
“ingenious products”