Single or double letters? Spelling practice for the season

Because we are in a holiday mood (not an holiday!), today’s lesson is going to be light. Just a little spelling drill, a bit of explanation and the class is over, so that everyone can go back to their pots of mutton. Well, no one should be scared by the weight of ‘mutton’. It refers to ram meat — the way beef is that of cows.  Particularly, we are revisiting some words with confusing single or double letters.

Tricky s-words

Among the most notorious of the terms under consideration are those with either single or double S. But firstly attempt the following questions:

1. The teacher punished him because he … three words in his essay.

mispelt/ misspelt/ missspelt/ mispelled

2. The … of her name has caused a big trouble.

   ommission/omission/ommision/omision

3. Governor Sanwo-Olu will … the project tomorrow.

   commission/comission/commision/comision

4. You are … me.

   emberrrassing/embarrassing/embarassing/embarrasing

5. … is a state in the US.

   Misisipi/ Mississipi/Mississippi/Miissipi

The above shows that one must be very careful whenever handling many words with single or double s.  Have the consciousness that something may go wrong while writing. So, it’s not a bad idea to double-check.  Spelling misspell, misspelling or misspelt can be challenging because of prefixation. Just note that it has double ‘s’ — not one or three. It is the prefix, ‘mis-’, plus the root word, ‘spell’, just as ‘unnecessary’ is ‘un-’ plus necessary while ‘beginning’ is ‘begin’ plus the suffix, -ing.

The issue with ‘omission’ is that ‘commission’ has double M and double S. So, there is a tendency to generalise and burden ‘omission’ too with the twin M. ‘Omission’, however, commands only one M and double S. The analogy goes for ‘embarrassment’ and ‘harassment’.  For ‘Mississippi’, remember that names of certain cities, states or countries are peculiarly difficult to spell. Others of such include Illinois, Connecticut, Marseilles, Ottawa,  Johannesburg, Caribbean, Cote d’Ivoire, Morocco, Mauritius, Philippines and Liechtenstein.

 Dropping letters

Some words are intriguing to spell because they drop letters when they change classes, that is, when they change from one part of speech to another. An example is ‘argue’ (a verb) which becomes ‘arguing’ (without  ‘e’,  even as a verb in the continuous tense) and ‘argument’ (as a noun). In other words, while you are free to write ‘They like to argue’, it is wrong to write ‘What are they argueing about?’ Nor should you write, ‘The arguement over the state of the car is strange.’ The correct spellings are argue,arguing and argument.

Now, identify the words correctly spelt among the options here:

The … exercise was very interesting.

   pronuncing/ pronunciation/pronounciation/pronounsiation

The judge said Otti was … elected.

   duelly/ dully/duly/duely

We need to improve on our … culture.

   maintain/maintenance/maintainance/maintaining

Government is worried at the …. of the practice even in France.

   prevailent/prevailence/prevailentt/prevalence