Top 10 Misused English Words. Humans Many people who’ve had to proof read documents start to develop a kind of compulsive “tutting” at misused words.
Here’s my top ten words that are misused by either professional writers or public speakers who, let’s be honest, should really know better. I’m not being paid for this, so I don’t feel so bad if there are mistakes! “Refute” means to “disprove with evidence” and yet it’s commonly used, even by professional writers, to mean “rebut” which carries a similar meaning but isn’t quite so strong, as it can also mean “argue against.” The example here (“Simon Cowell refutes ‘scandalous’ claims he helped billionaire hide assets from wife he was divorcing”) is from a recent Daily Mail article. Nowadays, it’s almost universally assumed that “instant” actually means “quickly” or “without intervention.” “Enormity” means “extreme evil”, but it’s often used to mean “enormousness”. Less is used when comparing quantities that can’t be counted; for example, “I’d like less milk.” Hip-Hop in the Classroom. InnovatiVocab - home.
English Vocabulary Study Resources. English to French, Italian, German & Spanish Dictionary - WordReference.com. German English. What's The Longest Word In The English Language? : Krulwich Wonders… The longest word?
Well, that depends on what we mean by "word. " If a word is coined just to be long, like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, should that count? Here are the top candidates. One comes from Shakespeare (of course.) In Love's Labour's Lost, a clown named Costard, arrested for having unlawful fling with a milkmaid, gets to say... honorificabilitudinitatibus That's 27 letters. Here's one you know better: antidisetablishmentarianism It has 28 letters, but what is it?
The most famous long word (at least in our times) is, of course, Disney's... supercaliphragilisticexpialidocious It uses 34 letters, but doesn't mean anything beyond giving Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke (and a slew of animated characters) something to dance to. So what if we want a word that is not famous for being long, but a word that describes something real. Otherwise known as the dreaded tobacco mosaic virus. It appeared in all its lettery splendor in 1964 in a reference source for chemists, "Chemical Abstracts.
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