Weekly English Words with Alisha Commonly Misspelled Words
Welcome back to Weekly Words. My name is Alisha,
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.