Learn five commonly misspelled words
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| Welcome back to Weekly Words. My name is Alicia, and this week we're gonna talk about commonly misspelled words. I'm excited about this because I like catching misspellings. |
| “Believe.” To “believe” something just means “to accept something as true,” or not true in the negative. “Believe” is commonly misspelled? Do they spell it “belive”? Well, “believe” is commonly misspelled. Don’t do that. So if you're having trouble remembering the correct way to spell the word “believe,” consider that the word “lie” is in the middle up the word, which is kind of counter-intuitive if you've been paying attention to the |
| Weekly Word series. If you're trying to persuade a friend to do something, you might say, “Please believe me, this is gonna be the best party ever! You have to come.” |
| The next is “a lot.” This is commonly misspelled because people like to put that “a” and the “lot” together. It's actually two separate words “a” and “lot.” “A lot” just means “a large number of something” or “a large amount of something.” Uh, “many” of something in a sentence you might say something like, “I have a lot of hobbies. I like skiing, snowboarding, and whitewater rafting.” So just spell them separately. Don’t put it all together. |
| Oh, the next, aah… “There,” “their,” and “they’re.” Students of English tend to be better about spelling these words than native speakers of English, and I find that very interesting. The first “there,” T-H-E-R-E, refers to “a place,” as in, “He lives over there.” “The book is over there.” Somewhere other than where you are right now. |
| The second form, T-H-E-I-R, is the possessive form of “they,” as in, “That’s their house.” “That's their dog.” Something that belongs to some other group of people. |
| And the last form, T-H-E-Y-apostrophe-R-E, “they are,” refers to a quality about another group of people as in, “They are the students.” “They are the teachers.” It's the contracted form of “they are.” |
| Onward. The next word is “grateful.” “Grateful.” The meaning of “grateful” just means that you are “appreciative” of something. In a sentence you might say, “Oh, I feel so grateful my teacher took time after class to explain this concept to me.” Grateful is commonly misspelled because this “G-R-A-T-E” sounds just like the word “great.” G-R-E-A-T. But actually, that “great,” “good” meaning is not the correct spelling for this |
| word. We use “grate (G-R-A-T-E)” instead. This spelling of “grate” is also used as a verb, as in to “grate” things in the kitchen. Umm...I don’t know if that has any relation to this or not. Probably not. It’s G-R-A-T-E. |
| Next is “receive.” “Receive.” To “receive” something as a verb means umm… “to be given something” or “to get something.” “Receive” can be kind of tricky because of the “I” in the “E” place where the “I” before “E” except after “C” rule applies. It's not a 100 percent true rule, but typically after the letter “C,” if the letters “E” and “I” need to follow it after the letter “C,” “I” is typically not the first letter to come. Usually it's “E” that’s the first letter. So it should be C-E-I, “receive,” rather than “recieve.” Something like that. And a sample sentence, you might say, “I received a gift from my friend on my birthday. I was really happy about that.” |
| The next word is “end.” The word “end” is not very commonly misspelled. But thank you for joining us for this episode of Weekly Words. Please watch your spelling with these words, as it can be very important to get them right. Thanks again, and I will see you next week. Bye-bye. |
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