Take a look at these two sentences – one of them contains a
mistake:
I poured over book after book.
We pored over the catalogues.
Are you uncertain which one is right? There are a lot of
words in English that look or sound alike but have very different meanings,
such as pore and pour or flaunt and flout. It’s easy to get them confused and
most electronic spell checkers won’t be much help in this type of situation:
they can tell you if a word has been spelled wrongly but they can’t generally
flag up the misuse of a correctly spelled word.
Here’s a quick-reference list of pairs of words that regularly
cause people problems. The words follow the accepted British English spelling.
Some of them do have alternative American spellings and you will find these at
the main dictionary entry on this website.
Word 1 Meaning Word 2 Meaning
accept to agree to
receive or do except not including
adverse unfavourable,
harmful averse strongly disliking; opposed
advice recommendations
about what to do advise to recommend something
affect to change or
make a difference to effect a result; to bring about a result
aisle a passage
between rows of seats isle an island
all together all
in one place, all at once altogether completely; on the whole
along moving or
extending horizontally on a long referring to something of great length
aloud out loud allowed permitted
altar a sacred
table in a church alter to change
amoral not concerned
with right or wrong immoral not following accepted moral
standards
appraise to
assess apprise to inform someone
assent agreement,
approval ascent the action of rising or climbing up
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