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Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 322
enthusiast
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OP
enthusiast
Joined: Feb 2002
Posts: 322 |
This week's theme is words that seem to be misspellings of everyday words. Why biennial? I can't tell what everyday word (other than itself) it resembles. Any hints for me?
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
Why biennial? I can't tell what everyday word (other than itself) it resembles.
You took the words right off of my fingertips.
Post Edit: I fed it to m-w.com misspelled as bienial to see what alternatives it came up with. Onliest reasonable choice was biannual which *should mean occurring twice a year but which has the secondary defintion of BIENNIAL.
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
I don't see biennial as presenting a spelling problem at all. It doesn't make sense to me why it was included as a spelling problem.
biennial:
It looks right.
bienial:
That shore doesn't look right--that would look like something pronounced: bie-EEN-yul
biannual:
That just sounds altogether different. Of course, if you stare at any word long enough, it starts to appear to have been incorrectly spelled. Wonder what's the psychological term for staring at a word until it begins to appear to have been misspelled?
But biennial probably presents more a problem of being used incorrectly with regards to its definition that to its spelling.
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