Test your spelling: Are you too clever to spell?

As The Times reported yesterday, lexicographers have found the most misspelt words in published documents and on the internet. They are words people wrongly assume to be derivations from certain Latin words, proving that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Standards in spelling are often said to be slipping and one professor recently called for "variant spellings" (or mistakes) to be accepted in common usage, so fed up was he with correcting his students' errors.

But tests show that children today are 12-18 months ahead in spelling compared to their peers who took the same test in 1975. 

So are you too clever to spell correctly? Test yourself on the most misspelt words in the language. Click "Continue reading" to find the answers. But don't cheat.

Update: Thanks to the commenters for pointing out the error in Sacrilegious, unfortunately not a deliberate mistake in the post and many apologies. Sarah Ebner is away and did not write this post.

Is it

1) a) Supercede

b)  Supersede

c)  Superceed

2) a) Concensus

b) Consensus

c) Concensas

3) a) Liquefy

b) Liquify

c) Liquiefy

4) a) Sacreligious

b) Sacreligous

c) Sacrilegious

5)a) Indict

b) Indite

c) Indight

6) a) Haemorhage

b)  Haemorrage

c) Haemorrhage

7) a) Connoisseur

b) Connosseur

c) Conniseur

8) a) Lieutenent

b) Lieutenant

c) Leiutenant

9)a) Corollary

b) Corollory

c) Corrolary

10) a) Liason

b) Liasson

c) Liaison

And the answers are....

1 b) Supersede

2) b) Consensus

3) a) Liquefy

4) c) Sacrilegious

5 a) Indict

6) c) Haemorrhage

7) a) Connoisseur

8) b) Lieutenant

9) a) Corollary

10) c) Liaison

How many did you get right? Tell us in the form below - and include your age.

Comments

[Trillian]

I'm 15 years old and terribly ashamed of my 7/10 score, although I would have gotten another point if I were allowed to spell "liquefy" with an "i." I also incorrectly spelled "supersede" and "sacrilegious." (Note: Split infinitives such as in the previous sentence are not actually incorrect. See http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutgrammar/splitinfinitives and spread the word.) Oddly enough, I hadn't mentally connected the spelling of "indict" with its pronunciation and only picked the correct spelling by eliminating the variations I've never seen written. I believe my problem is more one of pronunciation than spelling, although not with common words. An old english teacher of mine once revealed that as a child she had pronounced "unique" as "YOO-nih-kyoo."

[Bill Glanvill]

9 and Im 66. I dont trust spell checkers, not since mine reverted to American and refused to change back. Rather a waste of time having it.

[G.Shaw]

Yes all 10 but then i am pushing 70 Stay away from Americun dictshunarys and spellchekers and you will be fine.

[kitty]

10 out of 10 and I'm 54. I have recommended the Spelling Bee website to a French school student as it gives her a good opportunity to listen and spell and have a bit of fun too.

[Malcolm]

9/10 687 English

[KN]

9/10 (but my dictionary says that the word "liquefy" can also be spelled "liquify")
I'm an 55-year-old Japanese, teaching linguistics at college. I'll cast my vote for the freeing up of English spelling Prof. Wells calls for.

[LC]

10/10
16 years old, london.
so much for 'feral youth'

[Kabir]

4/10, not proud of it. phd student in law.

[Lauri]

Boy do I feel good about my 7/10, pretty good for a Finnish technology student. To be fair I've had more practice than my peers but still. An interesting point, though, is that it wouldn't make any sense to have spelling bees in Finland because in the Finnish language all words are pronounced exactly as they are spelled. Shouldn't that make me even less likely to know how to spell?

[Hannah]

A somewhat shameful 4/10.

I'm 16, and starting university in September. Commence despair. :(

[ofap]

10/10, age 55 (UK)

[voetstoots]

7/10

44 year old, English 2nd language (Afrikaans-speaker, living in Johannesburg)

[Marco]

I have got 8/10 and stepped over liquefy and haemorrhage. Italian scientist, in UK from 2005.

[Jaskhal]

8/10
age 49
OK, only 8 out of 10… Sorry, I'm French…

[Miranda]

10/10

20, British, in the final year of a BA in English Literature with Creative Writing.

To those of you relying on MS Word for spellchecking, be warned - even when set to English (UK), it confuses spellings, and its dictionary is missing a lot of words that it will incorrectly flag up as wrong. As for the grammar check, I have that permanently turned off despite the amusement it's caused in the past.

[Nessa]

10/10

Learning to read and write in Cymru means good spelling is a must.

[Guy]

8/10

Not at all bothered, that's why I have a spell check in the microsoft products.

Some of these are words I rarely if ever use and as such I wouldn't acquire the correction/learning through repetition.

I expect my staff to use a spell check on all documents but I'm more interested if they can write with good grammar and have it flow to allow them to transfer information easily to the reader.

With degree, post grad and professionals and with a good job I haven't the time (nor do I attach enough importance) to worry about every obscure spelling when I have a IT tool to check and correct for me.

[Vanessa Hughes]

Nineteen, English, currently at Aberystwyth uni, in a lecture right now actually!

[Dan]

7/10
27-year-old journalist who trained as a primary school English teacher at university.
Lucky for the kids I went into newspapers not so lucky for my readers. Thank heavens for sub-editors

[Kelly]

8/10

22 from the United States. 4 years of university training and 1 year of medical school.

I picked those pesky American alternatives for "supersede" and "liquefy." But at least, I now know how to properly spell haemorrhage, even if the British spelling adds a letter.

[mark]

I am a froggy and do you know what i have? all ze rite answers...beut i dont neut read the sun...actually i do sometimes specially the The Sun says .....

[june]

8 out of 10, aged 53, a self confessed spelling freak so a bit disappointed!

[Kuro Fukai]

I'm younger then probably any commentor here, 14, and I got every single one of these little answers right.

I'm a writer, so, I suppose it comes naturally. But still, easy enough

[Kuro Fukai]

I'm younger then probably any commentor here, 14, and I got every single one of these little answers right.

I'm a writer, so, I suppose it comes naturally. But still, easy enough

[Githerax]

8/10 - age 37 - American, got Supersede and Liquefy wrong (however, both are kindly listed as 'alternative' in American dictionaries).

[Jared]

9/10 for Supersede, but the Oxford American still has it (even though it is mainly to note that it is wrong). Doh.

27, USofA

Coincidentally, I hope the article referencing this spelling quiz isn't indicative of a larger move toward abandoning grammar, general linguistic standards and that "txt speek" garbage in my beloved native tongue. There may be a few (wonderfully quirky) rules of English spelling, but that's what makes it so expressive and worth learning right, darnit!

[Merlin The Mage]

I'm 15 and got them all right.
I can has college degree now?

[Melissa]

All correct; 43, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

[kris russell]

All correct.
im am 57 in two weeks time.

[brian]

9/10

Liquefy :(

i'm 17 from Singapore.

[Lenka]

I'm 23 from Czech Republic and have just finnished my BA. degree in English and German. I got 7 right answers:( which would definitely not please my grammar teachers...

[mivona]

10/10 Anglo-American, age 51.

[Renee]

9/10

I'm 32.

[MontiLee]

8/10

Tripped up on "Supersede" and "Liquefy".

American, writer, 35, two years of college too many years ago. I commonly mis-spell "equipment" - I always want to add an extra 't'.

Without universal spelling, we'll fail to understand each other in print and online. I used to belong to an online forum where proper spelling and grammar were important because we were an international community. Why should and ESL (English as a Second Language) spell better than most adults?

Life becomes an LOLCat macro? Gods no!

A agree with Juls - let's have a Grammar test!!!

I consider myself an excellent speller but now I need a hug and a cookie.

[Aaron]

10/10, age 34 and I'm from the 'States.

Didn't finish College.

[Lisa]

9/10 (got caught by Haemorrhage)
26. Educated in South Africa and the UK.

[F]

26 from Germany, 9/10 ... and supersede VS supercede is such an old hat; if even renowned dictionaries disagree, I guess I'll claim "bad example". :p

[Robin]

10/10
age 19
Primary education in Massachusetts, College in Vermont.

If kids read more (or at all), they wouldn't have this problem. I do think kids SHOULD be held back in school if they can't perform simple spelling tasks. Settling for the average is not the way to advance education.

[Pat]

10/10

25

[N]

8 / 10, Disappointed!

27, various Canadian and Irish schools.

[N]

8 / 10, Disappointed!

27, various Canadian and Irish schools.

[Penny]

Age 51 7 out of 10,
Would not have done so well if I had had to actually spell the words!

[Suzanne]

9 out of 10
40 years old
Educated in the Yukon at the local school

[Kerry]

10/10 Age 36 - Educated in both the State and Private sector, but due to my parents, I was reading before I went to nursery school at the age of 4. There is no excuse for poor spelling, and phonetics is just an excuse for the liberal left to legitimise their lack of care in this matter. It is indictative of the appalling class envy demonstrated daily by this government and its cronies in the public sector that they allege that correct spelling and grammar is now irrelevant. This attitude disgusts me.

[Caitlin]

I'm 32 and I got 10/10 (including the correct spelling of sacreligious). I'm a geek. Educated in an Australian (NSW) Steiner school from year 9, public (state) school before that.

[Regina Dabbs]

8/10; and embarrassed about that! Aged 51, US public school. I'm the dork who takes time off work to watch the national spelling bee!

[Andy]

10/10, age 38, educated in public school in Georgia, USA. I would have missed 'supersede' if not for a recent article on the word. Spell check frequently corrects my tendency to misspell 'receive'.

[pbhj]

It wouldn't have been hard to post this as any actual multiple-choice test. Add an age box and the results could have been shown real-time. Surprised that The Times couldn't be bothered to do that.

[Peter Marchese]

I had only 4 correct, I am 79 years old and had a technical school education.

[Michelle]

aged 21, 9/10 correct. misspelled supersede.

[Nuno]

9/10. 37 years old, Portuguese. That "liquefy" was a bugger. Educated in Lisbon's public school system. BA in marketing in the UK.

Spelling correctly is like the quality of the air we breathe!

[Camilla]

9 right, 22, brazilian. I misspelled liquefy.

[calgirl]

9 right; 56 ; American, educated in Texas

[V]

10/10 - I'm 17. A few years ago we were given this test by our headmistress, and the list has changed since. I find it incredible that the word "dumbbell" was on it in 2006.

I remember our benchmark spelling test from junior school contained the word "ostentatious". We were given it every year. I thought my classmates were really thick for not remembering the spellings from last time each time we were given it. The first time I took it when I was 6, I thought I'd be really clever and write "austentatious". I was very upset at getting 99/100.

[j]

Agree Lucy. I like variety in accents, it's interesting and the local words tell you a lot about local life.

[Lucy]

Oh, don't worry J, the rest of the post wasn't really aimed at you or Heather, I was just ranting a bit - basically, I thought it was silly and patronising for someone to comment that it was ok to speak with an accent, but not to misspell - as if there were some hierarchy of not-quite-acceptable linguistic behaviour. I wasn't mad keen on the implication that accented speech and misspelling and both types of deviation from the norm, either.

[j]

Lucy well done for proving that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander :).

(Didn't quite get the rest of the post- I only asked Heather if she was kidding, as it was so ironic to make those errors in a sentence telling us how easy it was to be perfect, I thought she had to be joking.)

My son was a lousy speller aged 6 and is an accurate speller aged 16. I think the difference has been (a) Latin, (b) spelling tests (c) reading but mainly (d) growing up a bit.

[Geoffrey L]

Seven (or eight - I went so fast that I forgot which answer I chose on one). Age 62, American schooling. "I haven't written much in decades so I've lost a lot", he added somewhat defensively.

[Sarah Ridgeway]

8/10 and aged 39 (honestly!)
Interested to see how many people confess to 2/10 or so.

[Lucy]

Uh ... J... following youse's example earlier, the mistakes with proper nouns below are *intentional* like.

[Lucy]

'27, 10/10, public school;
if people speak accents that is fine,
but if you cannot spell then you are anserous. the same applies to grammar.'

Gee, T, how magnanimous of you. I shall be *so* relieved to break my long silence and go forth in broad Yorkshire dialect once more, now you've given your blessing.

If you were less concerned with using obscure words (btw, we all have google. Therefore, we can all look up funny words and feel smart, too), you might have had more time to reflect that the phrase 'if people speak accents' is unfortunate, at best.

A person may speak with an accent; people may have accents. It is very hard to 'speak accents', plural, unless you mean shifting comedically between scottish and irish every other word, maybe?

Oh, and learn to find the caps lock key. It's useful, I hear.

[Alan]

8 of 10 simply through carelessness : still, 80% is rather better than most examiners would require, is it not ? ( Aged 54 years )

[Joan Williams]

I am happy to say that I got them all right. I am 71 and only had a small island education

[Louise Harrison Durham]

10 out of 10 - I'm 55.

[T]

27, 10/10, public school;
if people speak accents that is fine,
but if you cannot spell then you are anserous. the same applies to grammar.

[derek]

9/10 and ashamed at myself for getting haemorrHage wrong!
Age 54, primary school class size 44, scholarship to a state selective school, colleges, unis, degrees etc. Straight 'A's in English always.
Now I'm going to go and write 100 lines: "I shall not haemorrhage in class even when the teacher belts me for getting my spelling wrong".

[claire]

which is obviously far more important than age... 27

[claire]

10/10 spelling and 10/10 for being totally hot

[claire]

10/10
such a dork!

[Mitya Smith]

I don't usually go in for these things as they remind me of humiliations at school. I guess many others feel the same and exclude themselves. Generally I find that poor spelling is the norm irrespective of where you went to school. A classical education might be helpful, I don't know (so might an Anglo-Saxon education), but it is impractical to expect the billions who speak English to have one.

[B McDonald]

10/10

Age 33.

[Mark]

10/10, 26yrs old.

Also as with Sam, French bi-lingual.

[j]

Heather, is it a spoof that you have misspelt "grammar" and said "it's rules" not "its rules"? are you pulling our leg to see who notices?

[Pippa]

6/10 (though given that I was sure of all my answers before finding that they were wrong, it's hardly laudable.)

- Pippa, aged 16

[Heather]

I'm 22 and I only got 5/10, despite having a first class law degree! I agree that seeing several variations made it harder. I always found spelling difficult as a child but was encouraged to persevere and am now (usually!) much better. I really agree that spelling and grammer are important and should be taught thoroughly in schools, although you can't beat individual reading. We should be proud of our language, it's rules are often fascinating and not difficult when properly understood.

[Am Denvir]

I got 5/10 and I am 31. Spelling was never my strong point though :-)

[Sam]

10/10, 29 years old.
I am bilingual French/Enlgish. A lot of these words were spellable more easily because of my background in French:
Sacrilegious, Lieutenant, Liaison...

[Riccardo]

All correct, but was unsure about a couple. 44, grammar school. Some people find spelling easy, but as I tell my kids, looking things up is the crucial thing. If you don't know, look it up. Indifference is the real sin, not inability.

[j]

sacrilegious even, I can spell but I cant type.

[j]

I also noted sacriligious but was too lazy to do anything.

Supersede seems to get most people. Long ago I was told it came not from ceding a place, but from "sitting above" as in qui sedes.

Not even learnt at school, but through music! I suspect good spelling comes from all kind of experiences, knowledge of other languages, visual memory, etc. Varies by person.

I notice we only talk about "spelling mistakes" in our own language, though. If we are writing in another language it's called "getting it wrong" ;)

[Johan]

10/10. 35 years old. American schooling.

[patrick]

I only got 7/10 - quite worrying considering I just got an A* for my English Lit & English Lang gcse's.
-Patrick, 16

[Dawn]

7/10 and I'm 33. Bit ashamed of that score!

[Lucy]

Poor English is different from bad spelling, I thought? Grammar is a fairly strict and logical system that allows precise communication, whereas spelling in English is based on some pretty arcane and rambling developments over time, and allows plenty of ambiguity already (homophones, verbs and nouns that are spelt identically, etc.).

[Carol Gregorious]

8 out of 10 (aged 56)

[Katie]

Age 21, 9/10 correct.
I got 'supersede' wrong as well.

[Matthew Charlton]

I was relieved to find I had scored 10 out of 10. The relief stemmed largely from the first question having made me think "If they're all like that, this could be tricky." Fortunately, they weren't.

I do think spelling is important, not least because it reduces ambiguity, and I despair at low standards of spelling. It used to be the case that it was possible to pick up and ingrain spelling skills by reading a lot, but orthographical errors seem constantly on the increase in books and especially newspapers. Worse still, they are cropping up among the few printed words on television, including news programmes.

I am 37 - neither a youngster nor an old fuddy duddy - but I am troubled by otherwise bright people's apparent indifference to correct spelling. I suspect a one-man boycott of shopkeepers whose signs demonstrate poor English will make little difference, though!

[Grayman]

Aaargh! No!! This article says 'liquify' is correct, but the original article specifies 'liquefy'! Which is it? I got either 8 or 9 out of 10. Strangely, I would have got 'sacrilege' right, but I got 'sacrilegious' wrong. Interesting.

[Alan Bailey]

Age 67. 8 correct. Ex working class grammar school. Ex engineer. Supersede and haemorrhage were my mistakes. Like other commenters, I paused on liquify/efy and decided it linked with liquId and liquIdity.

[Susan]

I'm 46 and I got 7 right, but only because I had something to choose from. If you'd read them out to me I'd have got 0.

[P]

All correct. Thirtysomething dodgy foreigner.

[Lynda]

I'm 56 and I got 2 wrong. Supersede - which I should have a ruler on the palm of my hand for; and Haemorrhage - which is the only one I spent time over, trying to decide if it had one r or two.

[Spinny]

Well, HP, I obtained 8 out of 10 too. I'm 37 and the converse of your "worst of state schools": I was privately educated and have 3 degrees from Oxford University (in humanities)... which confirms my suspicion that it's neither one's formal education nor one's science/arts persuasion, but the interest in reading that helps one decide, in each case, which of the 3 variants "simply looks right".

[HP]

I obtained 8 out of 10 which for an illiterate, philistine luddite (Luddite?!) scientist isn't too bad I suppose; some of us CAN read!

Age- 38 and educated at the worst of State schools!

[Lucy]

Thank you, Joss, for pointing that out! I agree entirely. 23, could spell everything on the list, but being dyslexic I did notice I misspelt receive on a note today, which rather makes a nonsense out of the test. Who cares if you can spell, as long as you can find a dictionary or a spell-checker?

[joss]

I'm 16 and got ten out of ten. We're not all thick. Not that spelling is really a measure of intelligence, but its nice to nip the sneering in the bud.

[Sam]

The correct spelling of 'sacreligious' is actually sacriligious.
I got 8 overall, but I didn't recognise the words in 9 and 5, I had to guess!
I'm 17, and just got an A in AS English Literature, although in that you couldn't lose more than 5% for poor spelling, which I think is appalling!

[Toothyed Ed]

I think the gist of the article is undermined by the author's inability to spell two of the words... Dear God. And this is the Times? I think I'll go back to the tabloids...

[Megan Sinclair]

I have just turned 15 and I got 6 correct. I always thought that my spelling was quite good. It's not the best result ever but given my age and the fact that I got above half of them right, I think I did okay. :)

[Duncan, Truro]

As a member of the class of '59, no problem to get them all. However, I regret that the radical experiments introduced with the Initial Teaching Alphabet during the early sixties was the demise of our spelling skills across the nation, and that was prior to Maggie being our Minister of Education!