Is there an official medical term for the loss of spelling ability?
When in grade school I was excellent at spelling. Now (34yrs) I often find myself forgetting how to spell some commonly used words while typing. Good thing for spell checker!
Which part of the brain is allocated for the thought process of spelling?
I’m not sure what the loss of spelling ability is called but I have been somewhat afflicted with it also. Like you I was very good at spelling in my younger years but now frequently have to look up words. I’ve heard others say the same thing so it must be fairly common.
I’m 25 and I’m having the same problem. Interestingly, I only really notice it when I’m writing by hand – I wonder if being able to spell check, as well as to type something out just to test if a word looks right, has become a crutch and my innate spelling ability is decaying.
Just guessing here, but I think what you may be suffering from is not so much the loss of an ability but just a bit of disorientation. Back in grade school, our vocabularies are much smaller, and we are taught the spelling of words that “obey the rules.” As our vocabularies grow, many of the rules we learned become meaningless. This is English, after all. The mother of all bastard tongues, in which any rule has a thousand exceptions.
I know that a lot of people discover difficulties with spelling everyday words after they begin studying and using alternative forms of orthography such as shorthand or IPA (International Phoenetic Alphabet).
I notice the same thing at age 40. As a former state spelling bee champion, I could spell a estimated 50K-70K words (larger than the vocabulary of most college grads), so I doubt that this was due to the increasing size of my vocabulary.
I first noticed the problem when I began to use spell-check on my word processor (which I’d stubbornly refused to do until recently). I still have no difficulty spelling words in regimes where I don’t have a spellchecker, such as ancient languages, some foreign languages, and the highly complicated specialized terms of medicine.
That doesn’t mean I always type them correctly (my fingers have minds of their own, and are always trying to anticipate the word I’m trying to type. Moreover they are incredibly clumsy), but I do catch the errors in hard-copy proofreading. (I’m not as good at on-screen proofreading - but that’s probably partly because I only print out the important stuff, where I’m going to pay attention, while e-mail, posts, and other casual typing I care less about gets a cursory on-screen once-over, at best)
I am rather more disturbed that I find myself making grammatical typos (there vs. their; it’s vs its) which I never made before -but only when I work on computers Interestingly, this tends to increase if my wrists or hands are stiff due to (e.g.) injury ir cold. As I said, they have minds of their own.
I notice the same thing at age 40. As a former state spelling bee champion, I could spell a estimated 50K-70K words (larger than the vocabulary of most college grads), so I doubt that this was due to the increasing size of my vocabulary.
I first noticed the problem when I began to use spell-check on my word processor (which I’d stubbornly refused to do until recently). I still have no difficulty spelling words in regimes where I don’t have a spellchecker, such as foreign languages, ancient languages, medical terms <where I don’t dare let a machine change my words: ileus, ilius, ilium, etc. are all legitimate words, but mean very different things; in nerves and arteries ‘median’ and ‘medial’ may both exist, half a body apart.>
That doesn’t mean I always type them correctly (my fingers have minds of their own, and are always trying to anticipate the word I’m trying to type. Moreover they are incredibly clumsy), but I do catch the errors in hard-copy proofreading. (I’m not as good at on-screen proofreading - but that’s probably partly because I only print out the important stuff, where I’m going to pay attention, while e-mail, posts, and other casual typing I care less about gets a cursory on-screen once-over, at best)
I am rather more disturbed that I find myself making grammatical typos (there vs. their; it’s vs its) which I never made before -but only when I work on computers Interestingly, this tends to increase if my wrists or hands are stiff due to (e.g.) injury ir cold. As I said, they have minds of their own.
Thanks for the replies. I don’t feel so bad now knowing that there are many with the same situation. I still am curious if there is an official name for this phenomenon.
As a slight hijack of my own post, I also notice that when I handwrite, I often go from cursive to print to upper case to lower case with no apparent rhyme or reason for the changes in mid-sentence, mid-word, etc.
What is wrong with me???
This is not what you are looking for, but it is related, so I’ll give it a whirl.
Okay, when you spell a word, there are two ways of doing it:
You break it up into smaller bits and spell each part out. That is, you’re “sounding out” the word. For instance, ‘parallelogram’ might be broken up into ‘parallel’+‘ogram’ mentally as one writes it down. This process usually happens with words one is unfamiliar with or words one doesn’t use very often.
Another way to spell a word is with a direct look-up from our mental dictionary. That is, this is a more “visual” effect. For example, the word “house” is very commonly used, and when writing it, one doesn’t really need to break it up into smaller bits and spell each bit out. So, this method is used with words one is fairly familiar with.
Brain damage can cause problems with writing. “Phonological dysgraphia” is the phenomenon where one’s ability to soudn out words and write them down is impaired. “Orthographic dysgraphia” is where one’s ability to visualise the whole word is impaired.
By the way, just to clarify, KnK, you’re definitely not suffering from either of these conditions!
Could it be, you’re just not as practiced? I haven’t noticed any notices in our paper for mandatory spelling tests for the general public. 
Seriously, you may be bringing it on by the very thing you now rely on. Spell checkers make folks lazy spellers, and often worse spellers. The local news had a slow news day, and did a thing about spell check and how often they miss misspellings. I don’t use spell check. I don’t like being criticized by an inanimate object.
I’m sure I could find a cite if pressed, but I’m just lazy.
My spelling has improved as an adult. I think its just because I pay more attention now
I find my memory is quite visual and misspelled words just “look” wrong. But with reading so many misspelled words they begin to not look wrong any more. That’s why I hate seeing words misspelled and feel the need to correct them.
I have the same, mind you spelling was never my strong point.
But I put it down to being increasingly adept at speed reading words by ‘shape’ rather than by the letters in it. I can frequently tell a word is the wrong ‘shape’, but have to try two or three spelling attempts before getting the right ‘shape’.
But when you’re young and at school you’re reading and spelling of word is much more structured, but consequently slower.
There is also a distinct difference between spelling a word in handwriting and typing it. It must involve different areas of the brain. Depending on whether I was mainly writing or typing when I first came across the word I have difficulty spelling it in the other.
Typing words also suffer from the ‘thinking further ahead than I’m typing’ syndrome. Which means I skip letters in the middle of a word, or even skip complete words.
Whatever is happening, one thing is always for sure; we’re all getting older! 
I vote for spellcheck. I used to type 50 wmp accurate. Now I don’t care. I go real fast hit F7 and let the computer correct.
I think it is a bit of laziness.
I’m 50 and I’ve begun having some problems with spelling in the past few years. But I rarely use spellcheck, so you can’t say that’s the sole reason.
I’m just like sailor with respect to misspelled words “looking wrong”. And I agree with his assessment: seeing misspelled words repeatedly makes them harder to distinguish from correct words.
I vote for the spellcheck as well. The Japanese have a similar phenomenom they call “Wapro baka” - word processor fool. It’s for people who use the computer exclusively to write and can no longer remember how to write the two thousand plus kanji (the pictogram type characters). Not exactly spelling but similar…
Same thing w/ me. Am 26 now - would easily beat our class mates in spelling competitions, yet, I wasn’t very smart compared to my peers…now, my spelling has noticably (sp?) deteriorated, yet, I feel smarter than most of my peers now.
I attribute to 8 years of binge drinking (4 years college, 4 years post-college).
I wonder how many of us started noticing this problem shortly after we started using the internet.
In pre-internet days, we rarely saw a misspelled word; everything in print had to go through a proofreader. And when our eye caught a misspelling from, say, something hand-written, it was an obvious glaring error, compared to the correct spelling that was imprinted in our brain.
That imprinting has all but disappeared; in fact now it’s the misspellings that are getting imprinted - especially with pronouns and/or words with apostrophes. I now have to actually think about certain spellings which used to be automatic.
I think panache has a point now that it was mentioned. I never used enuff, or BTW, or thru now I use them in everything.