misspelled

Misspelled is the past participle and past tense form of misspell, meaning to spell a word incorrectly or with orthographic error. It is used to describe mistakes in spelling, not pronunciation. The noun misspelling refers to an instance of incorrect spelling. The form misspelled reflects the verb's base misspell, which ends with two consonants before the -ed ending.

Variant spellings exist across dialects. In American English, misspelled is the standard past tense. In British English, misspelt is traditionally used for the past tense of misspell, though misspelled is also common in modern usage. Some dictionaries label misspelt as the British irregular variant of the same verb form, while many prefer consistency with American practice in global writing.

Causes of misspellings include phonetic similarity to the intended word, irregular spelling patterns in English, typographical errors, unfamiliar proper nouns, and rapid typing. Learners often confuse homophones, silent letters, or letter groups that commonly occur together.

Correction and editing: misspellings are typically addressed by proofreading, consulting dictionaries, and using spell-check tools. Spell checkers may fail when proper nouns, technical terms, or brand names are involved, and autocorrect can introduce new errors if context is ignored. In linguistics and natural language processing, misspellings are treated as orthographic variants and are modeled using edit distance, noise heuristics, and context-aware language models to suggest corrections.

Common examples include writing 'definately' for 'definitely' or 'their' for 'there'. Misspellings can affect readability, credibility, and information retrieval, underscoring the importance of accurate orthography in communication.