The Hindu Business Line : <I>Look up the wrong word </I>

Bazaar-bizarre, crews-cruise, faint-feint, greave-grieve, knotty-naughty, overseas-oversees, residence-residents... These only a few of the pairs explained in The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Misspelled and Easily Confused Words by David Downing and Deborah K. Williams (www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

Homophones, that is, `words that are pronounced alike but are different in spelling, meaning, or both', can be one cause of confusion, explains the intro. "Common homophones include sail and sale; their, there, and they're; and knight and nigh."

Another cause of confusion between pairs of words is from `the grammatical rules that govern their use'. In this category are "such pairs as can and may; among and between; and shall and will." For example, use `I can' to mean that you are capable of or know how to do something, while `may' is used for indicating permission to do something.

Yet another category of confusion is of words that are easy to mix up. "Such word pairs as infer and imply; disinterested and uninterested; and flounder and founder are often used incorrectly because they are similar in meaning and form yet have subtle differences in definition."

For instance, flounder means `to make awkward attempts to move or gain balance, to move clumsily or in confusion'. And `founder', apart from referring to `a person who founds or establishes something', means `to give way, collapse, or become disabled' and `to sink beneath the surface of water'.

The second part of the book is on misspelled words. In this section, you can look up the misspelling and find the correct spelling. "For example, if you are not sure how to spell the word for a compulsive thief, you might try looking up `cleptomaniac'. In a regular dictionary all your searching in the c's would be in vain, because the word you need begins with a k: kleptomaniac. And if you gave up on the fancy word and started looking for `theif,' you would have just as little success: Thief is one of those `i before e' words."

Painstakingly, therefore, the authors have listed `more than 7,000 commonly misspelled words and more than 17,000 ways in which those words are most likely to be misspelled'.

Useful reference, especially to those who find themselves floundering in English!

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