• 2-minute read
• 24th July 2017

Spelling Tips: Letter Omission and Addition

A lot of spelling errors occur due to letter omission and letter addition (or ‘omision’ and ‘addittion’, if you prefer ironic spelling).

This is nothing that a good proofread won’t solve, but it still pays to know the kinds of words often affected by these mistakes.

Letter Omission

Letter omission happens when you miss a letter out of a word. This is common when words contain a double letter somewhere. The word ‘misspell’, for example, is often misspelled as ‘mispell’ (yet another ironic spelling error).

Other double-letter words prone to letter omission include:

Letter omission isn’t limited to double-letter words, though. Sometimes it happens because a word features a silent letter. Examples include:

In addition, British and American English differ when it comes to doubling the ‘L’ in some words, so using the US spelling would result in a letter omission error in UK English.

Letter Addition

Letter addition errors are also common in words with double letters, as it can be tempting to add a second double letter to some terms. Examples include:

However, there are words that shouldn’t have any double letters, yet which still suffer from letter addition. These include:

There are even words where double letters are not an issue, but where letter addition remains a problem.

‘Truly’, for example, is often misspelled as ‘truely’, and ‘humorous’ is frequently written as ‘humourous’. This is because a letter is meant to be dropped from the base forms of these terms (i.e. ‘true’ and ‘humour’) when adding a suffix.

A Bit of Both

Finally, some words suffer from letter omission and letter addition at the same time! As above, this is most common when the word already contains at least one double letter. Examples include:

These words can be tricky, so make sure to double check them in your work!