Despite its reliability, a dictionary is still an imperfect book. It may be the bulwark of language accuracy and spelling, but there are errors in the dictionary. It may come as a surprise, but some words in the dictionary are spelled wrong.
For starters, the dictionary has a limited number of words it can incorporate, with English having well over one million in its repository. That makes it challenging for the compilers to keep up. And many words continually evolve as centuries pass by, adding to the confusion for the editors. What’s more, if an editor misprints a word, the errors can persist for years and end up becoming part of the accepted vernacular.
Take for instance, the word “allemande,” which means “German” in French. This spelling has been in use since at least the 1600s, and was eventually absorbed into English. But as of 2020, the dictionary still spells it incorrectly as “almande.”
Sometimes words get misspelled because of typographical errors. This was the case a few years ago when the Merriam-Webster dictionary incorporated a spelling of “laisez-faire”, a phrase rooted in French, as “laseiz-faire”. The issue was caught and rectified, but it still demonstrates the potential for mistakes in the dictionary, which are then propagated to other media, like books and spelling or grammar tests.
Another example is the word “connote.” The complex word, which could be a great source of confusion for students, was mistakenly included in the dictionary as “connot” when it first appeared. It still appears this way in some dictionaries today, since the original spelling has been absorbed into popular british English.
Moreover, in some cases, due to its American heritage, the dictionary has spelled a word differently from the way it appears in British English. However, this is not considered a spelling mistake, since the two versions are considered two distinct languages with different usages.
Sometimes words are misspelled because of a deliberate decision by language scholars. This happens more often with proper nouns such as “Dalai Lama.” Here, the scholars chose a spelling based on the phonetic transition of the name as opposed to the actual way it’s written in Tibetan, which is “dlai-bla-ma.”
Finally, the definition of certain words have shifted over the years leading to a mismatch between the meaning and the spelling. This is the case with the word “ice-cream,” which has been in use since at least the 1600s yet still has no agreed spelling; it can be written as either “ice cream” or “ice-cream.”
Overall, words are misspelled in the dictionary for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, as long as language scholars, editors, and lexicographers stay on top of the changes, we should get an accurate dictionary to rely on in the future.