Well, I had a friend in college who insisted on using British spellings. He always had all his language settings on UK-English. He tried to claim historical reasons, but he later told me he just thought the words looked better.
And yet nobody ever seems to spell “infinite”, “infinity” or “infinitely” with an a. I wonder why that is? When you think definite, think infinite. 
I had a problem with “consensus” for a long time. Now I just remember that it’s NOT like “census”.
Speaking of poor spelling I just saw a friend post on facebook a picture of himself in his car about to hit the road coaxing the viewer to come along. He added the caption: Were too? :smack:
A couple that have been mentioned: I went from “opthamology” to “ophthamology” to “ophthalmology”, which is where I am now. I also used to think it was “dilemna” for some reason.
Not mentioned so far, I don’t think: it is “restaurateur” and not “restauranteur”, “souvenir” and…I don’t know I planned to spell it, but “souvenir” really looked wrong to me.
Proplem–Went through public school with this spelling; teacher in college physics pointed this out.
I do this. I know it’s not the American convention, but it’s not wrong, and I think one L looks wrong. I also spell it “theatre,” though I do not do “centre” or “labour” or “colour” or any of the other ones.
My bugaboo is “occurred/occurring.” I didn’t know there were two r’s until a couple years ago. Also harassment, which I thought had two r’s but doesn’t. I’m normally a very good speller, but those two words drive me nuts.
I argued with my 7th grade English teacher who spelled deity as “diety.” I told him he was spelling it wrong, he didn’t believe me. Google agrees with me. So there, Mr. R.
All my life I’ve only ever heard it pronounced as perogative. I wonder if how you pronounce it depends on where you live. Kind of like how due is pronounced do by some people and dyou by others.
My memory’s throwing up “dilemna” as a spelling option, too – though I don’t think I’ve ever used it.
What’s interesting is that if you Google “dilemna” you find discussions among people from all over the English-speaking world swearing they were taught to spell it with an N, so it seems to be a particularly wide-spread and persistent error.
And it really does look like a mistake, rather than a variant spelling, from what I can make out of the etymology – it seems to have been a double M since its origin in ancient Greek.
By the looks of it, if “dilemna” meant anything, it would be “double duckweed”.
I believed even through teenagehood that napkins were ‘nakkins’.
Me too. When I first encountered “Euler”, I had no idea that it was a German name, so I subconsciously decided upon a Greek pronunciation, by analogy with “Euclid”.
Wiktionary has an entry for “supercede”, noting that it’s a variant of “supersede” and giving these interesting usage notes:
[quote]
[ul][li]The form supercede is commonly considered a misspelling of supersede, since it results from confusion between Latin cedere (“give up, yield”) and sedere (“to sit”).[1] The original Latin word was supersedere (“to sit above”), but the ‘c’ spelling began to be used in Middle French, appeared in English as early as the 1400s, and is still sometimes found. The fact that supersede is the only English word ending in sede, while several end in cede, also encourages confusion.[/li][li]Most dictionaries do not include this spelling; a few list it as a variant, sometimes identified as a misspelling.[2] A search of general dictionaries at Onelook All Dictionaries finds 4 instances of “supercede” excluding this one (with one flagged as misspelling), and 24 of “supersede”.[/ul][/li][/quote]