1. Alfred Mosher Butts
Best known for: inventing Scrabble (first called Lexiko, and then later, Criss Cross Words)
But did you know: We owe our Scrabble addictions to the Depression? Butts was an architect who suddenly found himself unemployed. With nothing but time on his hands, he set about to invent a board game (he must have been, er, bored, without work).
So how bad was his spelling? By his own admission, Butts says he wasn’t a good speller, and was delighted when his Scrabble score hit 300. Apparently his wife Nina, a former school teacher, usually outplayed him.
2. William Faulkner
Best known for: his stream of consciousness technique in such celebrated novels as his 1929 classic, The Sound and the Fury
But did you know: the title of the novel comes from a Macbeth soliloquy? “…it is a tale
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
So how bad was his spelling? One of Faulkner’s editors at Random House, Albert Erskine, said “I know that he did not wish to have carried through from typescript to printed book his typing mistakes, misspellings (as opposed to coinages), faulty punctuation and accidental repetition. He depended on my predecessors, and later on me, to point out such errors and correct them; and though we never achieved anything like a perfect performance, we tried.”
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald
Best known for: The Great Gatsby
But did you know: The novel didn’t sell well during Fitzgerald’s lifetime? (fewer than 25,000 copies)
So how bad was his spelling? Preeminent American literary critic Edmund Wilson described This Side of Paradise as “one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.”
4. Ernest Hemingway
Best known for: those great stoic characters, like Robert Jordan in the 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls
But did you know: Hemingway was decorated as a hero after being injured during WWI? And served as a war correspondent in both the Spanish Civil War and WWII? (in case you ever wondered how he got all those Spanish Civil War details down so well in For Whom the Bell Tolls)
So how bad was his spelling? Whenever his newspaper editors complained about it, he’d retort, “Well, that’s what you’re hired to correct!”
5. John Keats
Best known for: the 1820 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn
But did you know: tuberculosis took the young Keats in 1821, at only 26 years of age? The same disease had already claimed his mother and younger brother.
So how bad was his spelling? In a letter to his great love Fanny Brawne, Keats spelled the color purple, purplue. This generated a longer conversation between the two, as Keats tried to save face by suggesting he’d meant to coin a new portmanteaux – a cross between purple and blue.
6. Jane Austen
Best known for: her elegant novels, like Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813
But did you know: she’d actually written the novel a good 15 years earlier, under the title First Impressions, but the publisher rejected it? (Let this be a lesson to all ye aspiring writers!) Then, after Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, there was interest in the older story, which, after some editing, was eventually published with the title we know today.
So how bad was her spelling? She once misspelled one of her teenage works as “Love and Freindship” and is infamously known to have spelt scissors as scissars.
Check out all past Weekend Word Wraps>>
Comments (23)
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Think of all the wasted brainpower used to overcome the inane/insane spelling schemes (or lack thereof) in the English language. It’s too bad we couldn’t start over with a simple new language for all mankind.
posted by RobertSeattle on 2-3-2009 at 9:39 am
This list gives me hope.
posted by Anna on 2-3-2009 at 10:32 am
Bad spellers of the world untie
posted by Nick on 2-3-2009 at 11:03 am
I agree w/ Nick UNTIE!
posted by edgee_1 on 2-3-2009 at 12:56 pm
I HATED Pride and Prejudice. I really tried to enjoy it, but it was impossible to overlook Miss Austen’s horrible spelling. Miss Austen’s ability to spell could be like that of Anathema Device in Good Omens, “not so much appalling as 300 years too late.” I doubt it. Fortunately, I have the sense and sensibility not to read any of her other tomes.
posted by tongueflap on 2-3-2009 at 1:24 pm
I’ve heard it said that as along as all of the letters are present, it doesn’t matter what order they’re in – the brain can sort them out to make sense.
posted by Mama9cats on 2-3-2009 at 1:52 pm
Please don’t ever replace our beautifully idiosyncratic language with something simpler.
There is no better language in the world for word games.
English is alive and well because we never hesitate to adopt foreign words or just make them up.
I can live with poor spelling.
posted by BassMan on 2-3-2009 at 2:10 pm
Every now and then my mother, an immigrant who never got the hang of writing English, would occasionally burst out “Why the hell is _______ spelled that way!” And I’d make the mistake of actually explaining! “See, back in the Middle Ages ‘gh’ was pronounced like in Dutch, something like the German “ch” – you spent a few years in Germany, you know what I mean – but people stopped using that hacking sound, but this happened AFTER printing so the spelling remained with the ‘gh’ “… Actually I was rarely allowed to get that far into the explanation, but you get the idea. Our bizarre spelling is really an interesting fossil history of our language and all its weird twists and turns. But what a royal pain it is, too!
posted by VM on 2-3-2009 at 2:36 pm
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
posted by Iszi on 2-3-2009 at 5:11 pm
Thank god, I still have a chance!
posted by Jill on 2-3-2009 at 7:35 pm
“It is a poor mind that can spell a word only one way” I forget who said that but it is something I find myself needing to say on occasion.
posted by Evelyn on 2-3-2009 at 8:19 pm
mark twain said that & i agree
posted by jane on 2-4-2009 at 7:47 am
I don’t get it. I adore F.S.F., & love This Side of Paradise so much that it is the only book I have ever really wanted to get a first run copy of. (Any one know where I can get one?) “one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.â€?? Was this dude just being a Prat because he could due to his apparent preeminence? Seriously, I do not get it.
posted by kathryn on 2-4-2009 at 11:25 am
C.S. Lewis was known to misspell words pretty regularl.
posted by Bob on 10-20-2009 at 1:09 pm
That these writers were terrible spellers should not be reason to aspire to (or live with) one’s poor spelling.
These authors aren’t remembered for their atrocious spelling, but in spite of it. Besides, they didn’t have spell-checkers back then. Today, WE do. We have no excuse.
posted by Hoboken on 9-18-2010 at 8:37 pm
In Keat’s and Austen’s defense, spelling was much more mutable in the early 19th century than it is now! Scissar away, my freind.
posted by sarah on 9-30-2010 at 9:05 pm
Editors rule!
posted by Poli Pen on 10-7-2010 at 4:19 am
Tongueflap:
i heart you. well said.
posted by sammylee on 10-13-2010 at 12:51 pm
@Mama9cats: that is false. Try to unscramble this one very quickly … dtomeaisinsin of bilanitaes ledas to islemaburmae bodoorem
posted by Lisa on 7-22-2011 at 6:16 pm
Answer: Dissemination of banalities leads to immeasurable boredom. Just food for thought. It’s only simple words that are “sight words” which follow simple phonographical rules.
posted by Lisa on 7-22-2011 at 6:18 pm
A few on this list were very drunk (or otherwise inebriated) whilst they wrote, which would account for some of the spelling problems. Also, as a writer, one doesn’t want to futz around correcting an error (especially with a typewriter) when one is mid-thought.
posted by Matt on 10-31-2011 at 6:47 pm
Well, times have changed w/ the good ol’ spellcheck.
These days, if you have these kinds of errors when submitting to entities willing to publish your material, they’ll want to puke all over the manuscript with self-righteous glee and then throw into the wastebin, shaking their heads and on to the next one.
posted by SnowPyramid on 11-4-2011 at 11:25 am
http://www.englishclub.com/english-language-history.htm
posted by Lucas on 1-27-2012 at 7:28 pm