For those of you who are learning English as a second language, the answer to this question might be “All of them!” Many words in English include tricky vowel combinations or unusual clusters of consonants that make their pronunciation and spelling less easy to figure out logically and to remember. Other words seem to ignore all rules of common sense, and are spelled or pronounced because – well, just because that’s the way it is. We’d have to trace the entire history of the English language to figure out why the words rough and cough don’t rhyme, or why borough isn’t pronounced “buruff.” Of course, there are always regional variations in the way some words are pronounced (try asking someone from London, someone from New York City, and someone from Texas to say the phrase “I can’t answer that” and listen to the differences) but in general, the spelling of the words doesn’t change.

Note: There are differences between the UK and US spellings of several common words, but we’re not going to address them here, nor insist that you choose between behavior and behaviour.

Here are some of the words that are most often misspelled in English. Can you pick the correct spelling?

The correctly-spelled words are 1a, 2a, 3b, 4a, 5b, 6a, 7b, 8a, 9a, 10b, and 11a.

When you’re learning new vocabulary words, practice spelling them out several times as part of your study routine. If your hand does something often enough, muscle memory will help you remember the correct way to spell words. If you’re working with a study partner, you can quiz each other by taking lists of words, as we’ve done above, making slight changes in the correctly-spelled words, and challenging each other to pick out the right ones. As with any aspect of vocabulary study, the more you practice this spelling skill, the better you’ll get.

What’s the one word you never, ever remember how to spell correctly?