• 2-minute read
• 10th October 2017

Spelling Tips: Letter Omission and Addition

One common cause of spelling errors is missing a letter from a word. Another is adding an unnecessary letter to a word. These are known as letter omission and letter addition.

In this post, we take a look at a few terms affected by these issues. Look out for similar words and you should be able to avoid errors in your own work.

Letter Omission

Letter omission errors are most common when a word is supposed to use double letters. Funnily enough, one example of this is the word ‘misspell’, which is often (wrongly) written as ‘mispell’.

As such, you should always check whether a word needs a double letter. Other examples include:

However, not all letter omission errors involve double-letter words. In other cases, a letter is missed because it’s silent or hard to hear when a word is pronounced. For instance:

Letter Addition

Adding an unnecessary double letter is another common error. This is particularly common in words that already contain one double letter. ‘Recommend’, for instance, is often misspelled as ‘reccommend’. Other examples include:

As with omissions, though, letter addition errors also affect words with no double letter. A few common examples of this include:

Double Trouble!

Some words suffer from letter omission and letter addition at the same time. These can be particularly tricky, so make sure to double check any term you’re unsure about. For instance:

American English

It’s also worth looking out for regional spelling differences. In Australia, for example, ‘colour’ is spelled with a ‘u’. But in American English, it’s spelled ‘color’. Similarly, American English does not double the ‘l’ when adding a suffix in some words. For instance, while we write ‘cancelled’ in Australian English, Americans write ‘canceled’ instead.

As such, using American spellings in Australian English can cause errors. Make sure you know the differences when using these terms.