Why do we struggle to spell certain words?

CBS News

3 days ago

Why do we sometimes struggle to spell words?
Why do we sometimes struggle to spell words?
Why do we sometimes struggle to spell words?
Some of the brightest young minds just finished showcasing their knowledge of the English language.
The 2025 Scripps National Spelling Bee wrapped up this week with participants navigating words the average person likely never heard of, let alone could spell.
While most might never reach their level of expertise, we wanted to know: Why do we struggle to spell certain words and does it get worse as we age?
Telling stories for a living requires a thorough understanding of the English language, but that expertise has exceptions.
When asked if she was good a spelling, Susan-Elizabeth Littlefield said no. "I would say a shaky C," for the grade she gave of her spelling ability.
"I feel generally good but I feel like over time, I lose a little bit of it," said reporter Derek James who was quick to add that he did win a spelling bee sixth grade.
Cole Premo, WCCO's digital manager, proofreads reporter's stories before they hit WCCO's website. "I'm always conscientious about looking at how I'm spelling. Conscientious, that's a tough one to spell," he said.
Ask anyone if they have a word they struggle to spell and they'll typically have an answer ready to go. For Littlefield, it's "cemetery" and "exercise."
"One word that comes to mind that I always look at multiple times is 'occasion'," said Derek James. Words with double consonants give him trouble.
Ariel James is an assistant psychology professor at Macalester College. Her struggle word is "license."
Why do we struggle to spell certain words?
"One thing is just that English in particular is very tricky. It has what people call an opaque orthography," said Ariel James. Opaque orthography means there isn't a clear connection between how a word sounds and how it is spelled. Other languages tend to have a more transparent connection between the two.
"In English there's just so many options for how to spell different sounds and so I think that's a lot of the issue so you have to memorize certain things," she said.
Another phenomon that's hard to explain is called "wordnesia." You've likely experienced it. You write or type out a simple word correctly, but on a second look it appears to be misspelled. You're left sitting there confused as to why the word is spelled in such a way.
"February, tomorrow is another one, restaurant," said Premo as he listed the words that leave him perplexed by their correct spelling. Wordnesia is described as a brain glitch for something that should be familiar.
Ariel James says our brains are often on autopilot when typing or writing until a word makes us acutely aware. "If you look at something too long, I think it lets you step out of this sort of automatic, 'I just know things, it's implicit,' and then you think too much and things become strange," she said. Others have theorized that fatigue is another factor that can lead to wordnesia when writing.
In those moments, you might lean on spellcheck to verify your spelling. Autocorrect is another tool helping people avoid typos.
Is technology hurting our helping our ability to spell words? Derek James and Littlefield both feel that people have become too reliant on things like spellcheck, furthering their slow loss of how to spell words correctly. Ariel James sees the technology as both helpful and hurtful depending on how its used. She said spellcheck gives users instant feedback, otherwise they'd continue typing a word incorrectly without ever learning the true spelling.
On the flip side, Ariel James said we learn information better when our brains do the work.
"If you're typing and things just get automatically corrected as you're typing, you don't really have to put in the same kind of effort that it would take to generate [spelling words] yourself," she said.
Putting in that mental effort could include memorizing a word's spelling or creating a mnemonic device to guide you.
"One tip that really helped me was someone told me cemetery has no A's," said Littlefield.
Studies have shown that while our vocabulary improves as we age, our ability to recall words or spell them correctly can diminish.