Avoiding spelling mistakes

World        

The familiar, but important, noun world, meaning the planet Earth, poses unexpected problems for writers of Thai English, who sometimes spell it wrongly as wolrd. This is another case of a short and apparently simple word that can be deceptively difficult to get right all the time. Sometimes this error is caused by careless typing and human error, where the letter r and the letter l are simply transposed. To resolve this issue, it is always good to keep an eye out for spell check in Word documents, which should automatically underline in red a wrong spelling of a common word such as world. There is also the spell check feature offered by Microsoft Word, which is slightly more time consuming, and proposes many alternatives which must be decided upon. Even without doing a full spell check of a document, the moment anyone types wolrd instead of world, the red underlining in a Word document should inform the writer that something is wrong, and needs to be fixed.

In other examples of this mistake, part of the problem may be in the challenging pronunciation for many people of the consonant r and the consonant l when they are placed together. A writer and reader of Thai English who sees these two letters together may be confused and reject the possibility of the spelling world being correct, without even thinking about it. I recall than a Thai ajarn who had spent many years earning a doctorate in an American university returning to the Kingdom and asking me for help, because he had no idea how to pronounce the phrase World Wide Web. The word world appears in many informal expressions used in English conversation, such as

It’s a small world.

That is not the end of the world.

This has made a world of difference.

We think the world of you.

It represents the best of both worlds.

The graduating student feels on top of the world.

The K-pop concert was out of this world.

Even more essential for students writing theses and ajarns doing academic research, the noun world is seen in an impressive number of titles of books and research papers. A quick search of Koha turns up over 20,000 examples of items at the Thammasat University Libraries using the word world. Some typical examples:

90 World-class Activities by 90 World-class Trainers; The Hamlyn Pictorial Atlas of the World; and ASEAN-United Nations Cooperation for a Better World. So it is worth getting the spelling right. Since the correct pronunciation of the word world can confuse some writers, it may be best to look at the way the word is written. It would be useful to grow accustomed to the order of letters found in the world, so we are no longer surprised or puzzled to see a word with the letters orl used consecutively. In fact, there are many words in English containing the combination orl.

Some examples include:

afterworld

colorlessly

dreamworld

forlornness

humorless

microworld

otherworld

posteriorly

underworld

worldliness

anchorless

demiworld

flavorless

mirrorlike

neighborly

superiorly

worldbeat

colorless

errorless

forlornly

moorlands

tumorlike

unworldly

vaporlike

worldwide

moorland

odorless

actorly

forlorn

worldly

poorly

whorl

Even if these pose problems to writers and speakers of Thai English who are concerned about how to pronounce the letters orl, the fact that so many exist should reassure us that this is a common combination of letters in English. By contrast, very few words exist in English containing the combination of letters olr, as in the incorrect spelling of world mistakenly chosen as an alternative by some writers. Among the only words found in English with the letters olr, in that order, may be listed:

schoolroom

poolroom

If we are faced with a choice of spelling a word using the letters orl or the letters olr in English, it is much more probable that the correct spelling will be orl and not olr. Sometimes following the probabilities can help us achieve a higher rate of success in spelling English, even if we do not remember all the details of why a word is spelled the way it is. The easiest and surest way to remember word spellings is to read as much as possible in English and see words used in the correct context until they become extremely familiar to us. When this happens, we feel safer trying to spell them. When the words still feel strange, like something we are not comfortable with, then it is not likely we will be confident spellers of the English language. As usual, reading is intimately linked with writing.

Word origins and usage

It can take a long time and much effort to learn word origins, and they are not always easy to remember. Many centuries ago, the noun world originally derived from a term meaning human existence or the human race or humanity. This sense of the word world was referring to life on earth as much as the familiar image of the globe as seen in maps of the world. It could also mean a place where life on earth happens, before eternal life in heaven. Sometimes the world also meant the earth or the universe as it was measured and described, leaving out the parts that were still unknown many years ago. Some expressions that are frequently seen are relatively recent, such as out of this world to mean something very good. This expression has only been used since the 1920s. In the 1950s, the French historian and demographer Alfred Sauvy first called developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America Third World nations. The original term in French, tiers monde (third world), was meant to separate them from the countries separated into the opposing worlds of capitalism and Communism. By the 1960s, the term Third World was often used in English. More recently, academic writers and students writing theses have tried to avoid the term Third World because it can seem to give a negative impression. Many of the countries formerly classified as Third World nations were poor, and so the image of the Third World was as a disadvantaged place, inferior to other parts of the globe. The idea that there is a world that ranks in third place, after worlds that are in first and second places, also seems offensive to some experts. At best, the term Third World is confusing, since poverty exists even in the richest countries. So some writers prefer to use the term developing countries. Yet last year, the World Bank decided not to use the term developing countries in its publications any more. The point was that so many nations classified together as developing nations had little in common economically that it did not make sense to try to force them into a single vague classification.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)