Alot rather than a lot.
Do rather than due.
Insure vs. Ensure.
I’ve also noticed the entirely too common practice of using loose instead of lose and I’ve often wondered why it’s suddenly so prevalent. It seems like it came out of nowhere, and almost overnight it was everywhere.
The loose/lose thing drives me nutty, but especially on one of my WEIGHT LOSS support groups. You’d think with the number of times people have to say “lose” that they’d get it. They’ve even been told several times, yet I’d say 80% of the people on the list spell it ‘loose’ AAAAAHHH!!!
Confusing the issue, loose does have a meaning as a verb, although it’s seldom used that way.
I keep seeing competant instead of competent. Also seperately for separately.
Of course, English is a funny language, and there are exceptions to all the spelling rules.
Baldwin: yes, I’m often tempted to say to people “what, you’re going to loose your weight onto the unsuspecting public?”
Masterbation and cant get on my nerves. Also, people who botch French or Latin phrases…if you don’t know how they’re spelled, don’t use them.
Oh…and I hate it when people don’t use three periods when typing out ellipses. They’ll use two. Ugh.
Most of what people have already mentioned really bothers me, but like others, I’d like to take the opportunity to say how much the misspelling ‘hampster’ irritates me.
Quite often the -ise and -ice sounds are muddled up in words like advice. Things like this really break up the reading – “Take heed of the old one’s advise young child.”
Not too common, but there are people out there who will use weather instead of whether!
A more frequent irritation is the misuse of the ellipsis (…), especially when people use more than three dots.
“Nevermind”
Never mind is not a compound word!!!
Oh, and:
“comming” instead of coming
“scarry” instead of “scary”
I’ll fess up to sometimes using more than three periods. Only in casual writing, and just to portray trailing off…
I don’t think I have a single one. Am I strange?
People using i.e. when they mean e.g., or vice versa. Grrr.
Yes. 
My neighbor just had his dog “spaded”. :eek:
I first started noticing it all over the place online a few years ago; like you, I thought it sprang up all of a sudden. My theory is that people had been spelling badly like this all along, but the only writing I read (pre-Internet) had been filtered through publishers, through editors. With the Internet, it was suddenly revealed how bad people’s raw spelling really is.
Why I started this thread: A typo is a typo, and a homonym is a homonym. But there are certain misspellings you keep seeing over and over, so recurrent and persistent, it makes you wonder what possesses people to get them so obstinately wrong. Especially when it isn’t a question of homonymns— like tounge, which just reappeared in a GQ thread on French kissing (a newbie’s very first SD post). What is it with tounge, for crying out loud?
Here’s one I see often, right here on the SDMB: concider. It’s consider! With an “s”!
Robin
Check out match.com, and you’ll find plenty of self-declared independant women.
There are indeed times when one should use four dots instead of three.
Cite?
Congradulations
Whichever greeting card maker decided that was cute to put on congratulationary cards for graduates should be shot.
Yeah, masturbation gets on my nerves too, especially when the guy behind me in line at Wal-mart is doing it.