If you can8217;t spell, you may be too clever: Study

According to them, the most commonly misspelt English word is supersede 8212; many come up with 8216;supercede8217; because of their knowledge of other words including intercede or precede, the Daily Mail reported.

The same theory applies to other words like consensus, liquefy and sacrilegious, the study found. 8220;The real spelling problems occur when people have learnt the rules or have a bit of knowledge, but make mistakes in how they apply this,8221; Ian Brookes, the Managing Editor of Dictionaries at Collins, was quoted as saying.

In fact, the researchers found the commonly misspelt words after running thousands of documents through a software programme designed to pick up spelling mistakes.

Supersede was by far the most commonly misspelt word, although it was wrong only one time out of ten.

Consensus is frequently spelt incorrectly as 8216;concensus8217; because the writer wrongly believes that it relates to the word census which comes from the Latin censere, to assess.

When it comes to liquefy, many are tempted to spell it as 8216;liquify8217; because they wrongly apply the spelling of liquid. And the same is true to sacrilegious which is often misspelt as 8216;sacreligious8217; as with religious and inoculate because many know the word innocuous contains a double 8216;n8217;.