Monday, April 11, 2016

Misspellings of "definitely"



Back when more lay people (as opposed to computer geeks like me) started entering the online world, about 30 years ago, I immediately noticed that a lot of them didn't know how to spell definitely. In fact, it seems that many of them didn't even know how to SAY it! Over the years the mangling of this word has continued...actually, it's gotten worse and worse, at least in terms of how often it's misspelled.

Here are a few versions I've seen:

- defiantly (see what I mean about pronouncing it?--how do you go from defiant to thinking it's the base of definitely?)
- definately (this seems to be THE most common misspelling)
- deffinatly
- definetly

Okay, for the record, it's DEFINITELY; its root word involves FINITE--and as you can see, there is no "a" in "finite."

Still not sure which word is correct? Please post a comment below, or contact us on Twitter.



No comments:

Post a Comment