How come the word "weird" looks "wierd" whichever way you spell it?

Weird doesn’t bother me. I have to think about tomorrow, and I worked with a guy that could never spell heifers right. He always spelled it hiefer.

EI / IE words have always been a spelling challenge for me—and I call myself a writer. My last name has an ie combo in the middle of it and people always get it wrong.

“I before E except after C unless it sounds like A.” But this doesn’t always apply.

In some strange way, it helps if I remember the phrase “It’s wired weird.”

@Yetanotheruser I’m dyslexic. That phrase stops me dead in my tracks while I mentally parse it.

I think it looks weird because it’s of Germanic origin. Germanic words tend to be strange.

Public and pubic. There and their.

“Professional” trips me up, as well as “potato”. I keep wanting to add an extra F to the former, and an E to the latter.

I find “accommodate” not very accommodating.

Schizophrenia. . Is hard to spell without a spell checker.

@zenvelo yeah, any of those “two of these” or “two of these but one of those” consonent words are hard for me too. Like recommend or innocent or innocuous.

^ Ungh. Recommend.

If I stare at any word for 10 seconds, it becomes strange and unrecognizable. I have a similar experience when looking at someone’s face. “Sh*t, do they know this huge thing sticking out of their face with two holes at the bottom?” Oh, right – it’s just a nose.

^^ Yes, I’ve had that happen too – more with words than with faces though.

”there” when I am thinking ”their”, and ”obvious” I can never get right the 1st time spelling it. ”Psychologist” is another because the spelling is not really phonetic at the beginning. English is such a bastardize language you almost have to have a base in a dozen other languages English was seemed to be cobble together from.

Weird, spelled correctly, look & feels completely normal.
No words trip me up, except for maybe kerb/curb, both figuratively & literally.

@janbb Um, there is a typo in your title?

^^ Nope – that’s an attempt at humor.

Neccesary

Psychiatrist and psychology and psychic and physics.

I was teasing ;)

OK. This is weird. I posted a comment on here, about one of my Q’s getting modded, like, a million times because I’d spelled the word “weird” wrong, and I kept missing it.

But…my comment is gone.

Wired!

I know there are many words that I find the spelling odd, but I can’t think of any on the spot. Instead, I’ll give you a list of words that have eliminated me from spelling bees in school before high school:
1. been (2nd place in the 3rd grade bee, this one is spelled oddly I think)
2. desolate
3. separate
4. sesquicentennial
5. steroid

subpoena
subpoenaed, subpoenaing

I was eliminated from a spelling bee by “colloquial”.
Even now I had to use spell-check!

That would eliminate me, too!

Here’s how I misspelled the ones I listed:
1. I can’t remember. I think b-e-a-n because that’s how she pronounced it, and I thought it was weird.
2. desilate
3. seperate
4. I pretty much gave up on this one so I misspelt it pretty badly.
5. steiroid. She pronounced it STEE-roid, not steh-roid. I swear that’s what threw me off.

steiroid <<< That still isn’t how you spell steroid, @dxs!

Actually, the way she pronounced could have been a clue. My poor son was horrible, just horrible at spelling. We’d spend a lot of time, hanging out on our big, covered front porch, going through his spelling words. “Stee-roid withonee” might have been how I taught him to spell the word.
“Seperate: SEP, Er, ATE. In SeptembER she ate.”
After we started working together he almost always got 100%.

But it’‘s “Sep-ar-ate”!

In English, vowel sounds in unstressed syllables are all pronounced the same, kind of an “uh” sound officially designated in pronunciation keys with an upside down e, called a schwa, giving no clue as to which vowel should be chosen for spelling. It is one of the things in English that can be so maddening.

@Dutchess_III I was listing the ways I misspelled them. If she had just say “steh-roid” (how I think it’s usually pronounced), I feel like I would’ve spelt it right. How else would I think it would be spelled with that pronunciation?
@LostInParadise It doesn’t seem like all are like that to me. In the word “designated”, the first syllable is stressed and the last two sound different.

In the word “designated”, the first and third syllables are stressed, and their associated vowels are evident. That is not the case for the other two syllables. You would get the very same pronunciation from “desugnatid”.