A bad spellers online dictionary gives assistance to those who have trouble spelling words. If you misplace letters in a word or can't remember a spelling or think you know how it's spelled but the word doesn't look right, you can use one of these online dictionaries to get it right.
Bad Spellers Online Dictionary
- A very simple bad spellers online dictionary exists at Aspell. The site is simplistic in nature and pretty self-explanatory. Enter the word as you think it's spelled in the "Word:" box and click go. If you use the default options, you should be fine, but if the word is really obscure, you can change the dictionary between "normal" and "huge" and the Suggestion Mode from "normal" to "bad spellers." For bad spellers, obviously select "bad spellers." That's it! The web site returns a list of suggest words for you to pick from that might be the word you need.
- Most online dictionaries allow you to put a question mark as a placeholder for the unknown letters. Vowels and strange combinations of letter often give the most trouble to bad spellers. If you know most of the word, then try going to Dictionary.com and utilizing that trick. For example, if you input "cr??n" into the search box you'll get no results, but the site will ask you if you meant a different word and then give you a list of words filling in the question marks. (Incidentally, the words the site gives are cran, cron, Creon, crohn, croon, crown and various acronyms. Another site you can use the question mark tip on is YourDictionary. Not only will it give you a list of words that replace the question mark, you can even verify you're using the right definition of the word.
- If you are a student or need to find a word related to the education field or subjects taught in grade school, middle school or high school, then visit Wordsmyth. On the main page you can start to type a word and the Java applet will present you the closest words it has in its dictionary. There is an option to choose a beginner's, children's or advanced dictionary. Where you can use the site as a bad speller is listed under the Search Tools tab. There's an option for Reverse Search. The last button is "Text String." Pick that and enter in a combination of successive letters. You won't be able to leave any out or use question marks like you can at the above websites, but it's a good choice if you have a specific type of word to look up.
List of Misspelled Words
If you don't want to use a bad spellers online dictionary all the time, you can learn to spell some of the harder words in the English language or those words that are often misspelled by many people. Here is a list of websites for study:
- Misspelled Words at YourDictionary is a section of the website listed above. After you've exhausted this list, go to the sequel, 150 More Misspelled Words.
- ESL Desk has a list of over 500 words for you to peruse.
- The list at Oxford Dictionaries includes the correct spelling of words and how to remember the spelling and the most common way the word is misspelled.
Going Old School
With the increased use of technology-computers, handheld dictionaries, phones-the way of looking up a word in an actual physical dictionary has fallen to the wayside. Each year, dictionaries are published and the popular and well-known dictionaries like Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage ones are still found on your local bookstore's shelves. If you have time, you should break out your old dictionary and look up the word that way. Who knows, you might learn a few other words in the process.
