I’m also a good speller, but I can’t for the life of me remember how to spell broccoli. I just had to look it up for this post. It annoys me that I can’t spell my grocery list right.
I also just disagree with the rest of the English-speaking world on how many L’s are in ‘cancellation’. I strongly feel it should be two, and that’s how I spell it, dammit.
Not a word, but a name. For years, I thought that the name of H. Rider Haggard’s hero was Allan Quartermain, but it turns out that the first “r” isn’t there. I suspect that I expected it to be there by analogy with “quarter”, but I had learned long ago that Professor Quatermass wasn’t Professor Quartermass (as I originally pronounced his name), so I don’t know why I persisted in the error. It might be because a lot of other people thought it was “Quartermain” as well – I’ve seen it spelled that way in movie posters and reviews. And it turns out that the are several “Allan Quartermain(e)” s out there:
Make that two of us. On my personal calendar, meetings are marked cancelled. Because canceled looks wrong to me.
Me too on both of these. Lately I’ve been muttering “I’m going to stutter when I check my CASIO occasionally.”
Is there any kind of rule for* -ENT *or *-ANT? *
“Independ…ent/ant? Screw it, I’ll just use ‘free’ instead…”
Segue rather than segway. I had never seen it written until I tried to do so myself.
Lost. I’ve been spelling it as “loost” for years now. :rolleyes:
Versus versus verses.
I have written a number of research reports were I would say something l like, “column A verses column B.” :o
“Missile.” This is a recent realization, as I used to know how to spell it properly. We were in a meeting and I was tagged as designated note taker. I probably wrote it a dozen times over the course of a couple of hours, and it took that long to realize I was writing it incorrectly as ‘Missle’. I wrote it another half dozen times as ‘missil’ and knew that was wrong, but I felt it was closer.
By that point, I’m questioning my sanity and inability to remember how to spell such a simple word. It’s also the first time I have misspelled a word and not recognized it immediately.
Fortunately, no one else was privy to my notes, and I was able to type it in an email prior to sending out the meeting minutes to my colleagues.
n.b. For anyone concerned, ‘Missile’ is a nickname for a piece of equipment we build, and someone decided decades ago it looked like a missile launcher, and the name has stuck.
I had a weird process with ‘segue’. I knew the word spelt segue. I knew the word pronounced ‘segway’. I knew they meant the same thing. But ‘segue’ reads as ‘seg’ to me, so I thought ‘segway’ was spelt ‘segue way’. I was in my 20s when I finally figured out ‘segue’ was the whole thing. (I still generally say ‘seg’, unless euphony calls for the ‘way’. It just sounds better to my ear. >_>)
Until I was about 16, I spelled “maybe” as “mabye.” It made sense to me phonetically – ma- could be pronounced “may,” and -bye could perhaps be pronounced “bee.”
It’s surprising that I never noticed that it was composed of the words “may” and “be” – really, it’s just a way of saying “that may be.”
I have trouble with a very simple one: the word for one’s sibling’s daughter. Always have to stop and think, when attempting to write it: “niece”, and “neice”, look and feel wrong – both of them. I usually have to look it up, to be reminded that the former is right.
We learned the principle, principal as “the principal is your friend” or pal?
;)Such a show off 
Is it normal as you age to have problems recognizing the right spelling?
“niece”, and “neice” they both look right to me, I depend on spell check wherever I can.
This is a recently acquired negative aspect of aging, if it is one
Think of it as something sitting on something older, rather than something to which something else has given way.
“I before E, except after C”.
Except when it isn’t – e.g. weird, seize. I always feel that this is the problem with English spelling – often as many exceptions to the “rule”, as observations of it.
I lost the ability to remember whether to double letters once the web came along and exposed me to much more British English than before.
As for kernal, that was the spelling used with the Commodore 64. Don’t remember why.
I’ll add Niagra to the ones already mentioned that got me…
dilemna (no Catholic school)
restauranteur
sherbert
I am and was a good speller though, in the later stages of an elementary school spelling bee, I asked for a more difficult word than view. Teacher said no, and I promptly spelled v-e-i-w
:o :smack:
There was a lot of red underlining on my above examples, though not restauranteur 
I checked a couple of dictionaries and while some still flatly dismissed restauranteur, several listed it as an alternate form with a usage note that some consider it erroneous.
For what it’s worth, my spell-checker which is the checker in google chrome doesn’t like it, though I can certainly add it. (I wonder if google communicates back to whichever dictionary originally provided its word database with words users add and the frequency with which any given neologism is added.)