If you can’t spell, you may be too clever: Study

Can't spell supersede correctly? If you think you're stupid, you may be wrong. The consensus is that you are too clever, according to a new study.

Can’t spell supersede correctly? If you think you’re stupid, you may be wrong. The consensus is that you are too clever, according to a new study.

A team of researchers for the Collins dictionary in Britain has carried out the study and found that people who often misspell a number of “confusing” words as they are actually too clever.

According to them, the most commonly misspelt English word is supersede — many come up with ‘supercede’ because of their knowledge of other words including intercede or precede, the Daily Mail reported.

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The same theory applies to other words like consensus, liquefy and sacrilegious, the study found. “The real spelling problems occur when people have learnt the rules or have a bit of knowledge, but make mistakes in how they apply this,” Ian Brookes, the Managing Editor of Dictionaries at Collins, was quoted as saying.

In fact, the researchers found the commonly misspelt words after running thousands of documents through a software programme designed to pick up spelling mistakes.

Supersede was by far the most commonly misspelt word, although it was wrong only one time out of ten.

Consensus is frequently spelt incorrectly as ‘concensus’ because the writer wrongly believes that it relates to the word census which comes from the Latin censere, to assess.

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When it comes to liquefy, many are tempted to spell it as ‘liquify’ because they wrongly apply the spelling of liquid. And the same is true to sacrilegious which is often misspelt as ‘sacreligious’ (as with religious) and inoculate because many know the word innocuous contains a double ‘n’.