Other Common Mistakes and Why They Are Happening

Examples of commonly misused words, according to John Ezard (Where to stick grocer's apostrophe, Guardian Thu 8 Jul 2004) include:

misuse of "diffuse" or "defuse" (as in "A coach can diffuse the situation by praising the players").

Research for the new Concise Oxford English Dictionary, published today, found that this word crime was committed in some 50% of examples on the database. It is now rated as the commonest in the language.

Second commonest is uncertainty over when to use "rein" or "reign", found in 26% of examples, as in "A taxi driver had free reign to charge whatever he likes".

Third most frequent (21%) is "tow" instead of "toe", as in "Some pointed to his refusal to tow the line under Tony Blair".

Fourth (12%) is "pouring" instead of "poring", as in "He spent his evenings pouring over western art magazines".

Other common confusions include pedal and peddle, draw and drawer, compliment and complement and their, there and they're.

Angus Stevenson, of OUP dictionaries, said yesterday: "This seems to be something of a new situation. These errors are occurring in texts that are otherwise quite well spelt, possibly because of the increasing use of spellcheckers. Spellcheckers can tell you whether a word is correctly spelt - but not whether it is properly used.

"Also, we find that people are picking up words and phrases from the media and bolting them together into fully formed sentences."

The OUP database contains mainly written word usages. To measure speech, it used to include recordings from radio but now takes examples from the internet instead.

"People are increasingly writing on the internet as if it was a spoken rather than a written medium, with all the mistakes which arise through doing that," Mr Stevenson said.