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The 10 Most Commonly Misspelled Words In the English Language

Elyse Knowles

Australian model and former The Block star Elyse Knowles has made headlines worldwide this week for her unusual spelling of the word “voilà”.

In an Instagram post, Knowles misspelled the French word by writing “wallah”, prompting a certain amount of ribbing from her fans.

While on the home front, the 28-year-old was lightly trolled by social media users, it has also gained the attention of The Fat Jewish (Josh Ostrovsky), who shared the gaffe on his own account — to his 10.6 million followers to be exact.

“Spending an unhealthy amount of time thinking about how this influencer spelled ‘voilà’,” he wrote. Some may say that this is quite unfortunate, but we’re betting that Knowles has adopted a huge following and some work from this…

The mishap was actually from August and was recently circulated by Instagram Account Celeb Spellcheck. Look, we’re not saying it’s a great mistake but we’ve ALL made many spelling errors in our lives. In fact, we not only mispronounce a lot of words, but there are actually 10 which are most commonly misspelled in the English language.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, here are the words which most people get wrong. Including me. Thanks, Grammarly!

Publicly

How do people spell it? Most people spell it as they would say it, by adding in an ‘a’ i.e. publically.

Pharaoh

How do people spell it? Those who studied Ancient History in high school would know the pain of this one. People usually get the ‘ao’ mixed it up and write ‘pharoah’.

Definitely

How do people spell it? This is the one I spell wrong all the time and I’m sure you do too. Instead of ‘definitely’, most people write ‘definately’.

Government

How do people spell it? I learnt how to spell this correctly in year six and have forever pronounced it in my head as ‘govern-ment’. Most people forget the ‘n’ and spell it ‘goverment’.

Separate

How do people spell it? Most people who spell think that it is ‘seperate’ but alas, it’s ‘separate’.

Occurred

How do people spell it? Ah, the pesky double ‘r’. According to the dictionary, most people spell it: occured.

Until

How do people spell it? People will be spelling this incorrectly until the end of time with a double ‘ll’. Untill.

Receive

How do people spell it? I before ‘e’, except after ‘c’. Remember that rule? Most people don’t and end up spelling it as: ‘recieve’.

Which

How do people spell it? I had this incredible book Which Witch is Which, which (ironically) seared the spelling into my brain, however, if you didn’t have that book, you may accidentally forget the ‘h’. Wich.

Accommodate

How do people spell it? I truly cannot count the number of times that I have gotten this word wrong. Double c AND double m. Not ‘accomodate’.

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