Loath - reluctant
Loathe - hate
Loach - cop
Elude and allude.
To elude is to avoid capture or danger. Fleeing and eluding (from a cop) is something a person does when they don’t feel like being arrested today.
To allude is to hint or suggest. I may allude to someone’s criminal past in conversation, even if I never explicitly call it out.
When you go with the noun forms (elusion and allusion), people also mix these up with illusion, the latter referring to something incorrectly perceived by the senses or cognition, e.g. an optical illusion or the illusion of safety.
Every day - daily
Everyday - unremarkable
wet (whet?!) one’s whistle
Both involve control; but “reign” = “rule” (like a king or queen), while reins are what you use to control a horse. So if you allow a horse (or, idiomatically, anyone) the freedom to go where/how it wants, you give it free rein. “Free reign” is a mistake, though it’s one that goes back at least as far as 1896:
I didn’t realise that Mirriam Webster accepts leary as a ‘less common spelling’ of leery. So it may be correct in some situations. But I’m a bit leery of it.
There is another word that might be confused with leery;
lairy, which means loud, drunk, aggressive or conceited.
crapulous and crapulent
Iniquity and inequity.
Purposely and purposefully.
He purposely excluded her.
She purposefully repeated the steps of the task.
I often see the latter used when the former should have been.
The car crashed into the median
The ship headed toward the prime meridian
Jimmy Carter, trained in nuclear power plant operation, helped.
invoke: to petition for help or support. to appeal to or cite as authority.
evoke (see 1b. sigh.): Evoke Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
cue and queue
Also eminent/emanant (issuing or flowing forth). Spellcheck just taught me that last one.
Abject and Object, specifically in context of a kind of lesson. Someone wrote a blog post that they were completely wrong about What's an Abject Lesson vs. an Object Lesson? - Owlcation and the commenters roasted them. The blog post is even the top hit on Google, and so I’m guessing that idiot writers who just look at the first hit on Google are getting this wrong. I mention this because the accounting daily email I got a few days ago had an article that used in its title “object lesson” when they meant “abject lesson”.
To be clear, there is a such thing as an object lesson. But it’s literally a lesson that uses an object to help teach. It’s not the kind of terrible thing that happens that scares you straight and gets you to never make the same mistake again like an abject lesson is.
“Flushing something out” vs “fleshing something out” - a senior staff member could not get the difference between the two. She used “flushing” something out at nearly every staff meeting when she meant “fleshing”. I tried gently explaining it one time privately, but she couldn’t quite grasp it.
indict: to accuse of wrongdoing
indite: to write down
Yes: used to give a positive response.
No: used to give a negative response.
proceed and precede (found in a recent thread)