Friday, January 20, 2012

How Do you know if a word is spelled wrong in the dictionary?

So if you don't know how to spell a word and you look it up in a dictionary, and you spell it wrong because that's what the dictionary said you could loose pionts. How do you know?How Do you know if a word is spelled wrong in the dictionary?
Loose points? As in, release them so they can run around freely?



er, um,



Lose points? As in, get marked down on a school assignment?



Spelling errors in dictionaries are rare. But, yes, they can happen.



One way to check whether the entry was wrong in the dictionary you looked at first, would be to look at a second and a third (and maybe a fourth) dictionary. But, if you want credit returned to you on a school assignment, you need to show your teacher the entry that you originally used. You might not be marked down for a dictionary publisher's mistake, if the mistake is really in that dictionary.



However, if you picked the wrong word when you looked it up, there's not much that can help you. So-called "spelling dictionaries" are useless when it comes to this problem. There's a difference, for instance, between the word "loose" (as an adjective, meaning the opposite of "tight", or as a verb meaning "release" or "let go of") and "lose" (as a verb, meaning the opposite of "gain" or "win" or "find").



You could lose points for suggesting that you could loose points. That isn't usually graded as a spelling error. That would be graded as a word choice error. There is a word that is correctly spelled "loose". It's wrong to use the word "loose" the way that you used it.



Maybe you really did have the right word in mind and you misspelled it. But, there's no way that what you've written can show that. It looks like you simply picked the wrong word.



So, when you do look something up in a dictionary, you need to check the word's meaning, not just its spelling. You have to correctly spell the correct word.



Computer spell checks and grammar checks can't do that for you. You have to learn these differences for yourself.How Do you know if a word is spelled wrong in the dictionary?
Enter the word, as best you can spell it, on your computer. Then hit your spell check icon.

You will get the correct spelling and several other words that it could possibly be. The choice is yours. Good luck.How Do you know if a word is spelled wrong in the dictionary?
Unless you're using a truly bad dictionary, or one which was very ineptly proofread, you shouldn't find ANY misspelled words in a dicitonary--that's part of their intended function, after all. I would imagine that you could beg back the points by producing the evidence of the incorrect listing, but I would think it would require more than merely SAYing you'd taken the incorrect spelling directly from a valid dictionary.

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