Contempt for Spelling Words · 8 February 2025
Have you ever spelled a word correctly, but saw it so many times that you thought it looked misspelled? Nah. Me neither.
I recently wrote about the app and website, DailyPrompt. I sent a preview to the founder of the endeavor and he told me about a mistake that I had made. I had misspelled DailyPrompt in one place. I thanked him and told him I would fix it. Which I did. The interesting thing though is that I used DailyPrompt 17 times in the post. Which is a lot for any single word in one blog post. Unless, of course, that word is something common like “the” or “and” or even “or.” I was amazed that I had used the word that many times.
At any rate.
The interesting thing about the whole endeavor is not the fact that I misspelled the word only one time in those 17 times, but that when I was fixing the error, it started to look wrong. I knew I was spelling “prompt” correctly, but it looked misspelled. I used the computer to look for “Daily” then “DailyProm” then “DailyPrompt” as my final pass. I made sure that I counted the instances of “DailyProm” and “DailyPrompt” so I could make sure they were the same number. Thankfully, they were.
I say thankfully for two reasons.
The first reason is because the computer was more reliable than my eyes at that point. I was seeing “prompt” as a misspelling even though I knew it was correct. Apparently, familiarity does breed contempt. Even contempt for a word. Or maybe contempt is not the correct word. But I was definitely thinking that the word was taunting me or something. So I was definitely not happy with it.
The second reason I say thankfully is because the computer was giving me a red squiggly line underneath my one correction of DailyPrompt. The one that was previously “DailyPromt” but was corrected to “DailyPrompt” was still underlined with that hated red squiggly line. Even after I corrected it. (By the way, I went back to correct the post one more time and the corrected instance was still underlined with that red squiggly line. And it was the only instance of said squiggles.)
Normally, I would blame a certain large tech company that produces operating systems and productivity software and other things, but this was happening on my website software. The place where I post my blog. Which was interesting. I do wonder if I will still see it the next time I open the post. Probably. But that is okay. I can live with it.
Photo courtesy of Ryan Lindsey
I wonder about the phenomenon of seeing a word that is correctly spelled looking like it is misspelled. I thought maybe I would see if misspelled would look that way after a few instances on a page. Turns out that it does not. At least not the number of times in this post. But I am sure it happens with other words. Or maybe not. Maybe it only happens with words that have “mpt” in them. Think about it. There are probably on a few words that have “mpt” in them. I can only think of “prompt” and “tempt.” Okay. Plus words that have those words as their base. Prompter, tempter, tempted. You get the picture. Oh. And “empty.”
(Hmm. Seeing words with “mpt” cannot be the cause of seeing words as misspelled when they are not. After all, those words above do not look wrong. At least not with just a couple instances of them.)
Well, I am sure that somebody somewhere has a name for seeing words correctly spelled as words that are misspelled, but I am not going to look it up. It would not matter if I did anyway, for I would not remember. So for now, I will just call it contempt. (Hey. There is another word with “mpt” in it. Which, by the way, I just noticed as I spelled it.) I guess familiarity does breed contempt. Even with words.
© 2025 Michael T. Miyoshi
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