English words that are hard to spell

[Anzeigenhauptmeister]

Atrocity and alleged are two words that I always spell wrongly.

[Anzeigenhauptmeister]

I am always on the verge of writing Argentina with a second i - in two languages.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

I think I only initially get guarantee right about 20% of the time before spell check (but I actually did that time)

[Anzeigenhauptmeister]

I think I only initially get guarantee right about 20% of the time before spell check (but I actually did that time)

That reminds me of the name of a former mayor of New York...

[Thunder98 🇮🇱 🤝 🇵🇸]

Teh

[Badger]

Privilege and privileged.

I had a high school class on Russian history 1917 to present. We had an essay exam based on the book The Russians, where the gist of the single question was to discuss how the Communist Party apparatus members lived a far far better standard of living than ordinary Russians despite being a so-called classless society. I misspelled the word privilege or privileged 7 *, the same way each time of course, throughout the test. My contact was perfect, but he took a point off for every misspelling out of a 30-point test. Between that and one other word I can't recall I misspelled twice, he essentially gave me a c minus for to spelling errors even though my content was perfect. Total dick

[President Johnson]

Negotiations. I always spell it wrong outright.

[°Leprechaun]

Somewhat of a red herring. Sure English is difficult for many reasons, but computers solve the problem.
In other words, many words are hard to spell if you don't use spellchecker, but easy to spell if you do.
Thus, as difficult as some words are to spell, there is not excuse to spell them wrong.
Spanish, of course, is easy, by comparison. It's easy because it is phonetic. English and French are more difficult. I don't know off hand how many languages are as difficult as English and French in this regard.
I do know that George Bernard Shaw argued long ago that it was important to change the English language so that everything was phonetic. It is similar to the idea that it would be better to go metric.

By the same token the calendar could be changed. All these changes will be met with fierce opposition using the argument that if it isn't broken, don't fix it.

[kcguy]

Where I've run into trouble is not knowing the origins of a word.

I remember writing a paper in high school, and I couldn't find the Yiddish word knipschen in the dictionary.  It turned out I had it completely wrong.  It was of Latin origin and spelled conniption.