intravenious(ly)

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Mischievious" (spelling and pronunciation) was one of those things my seventh-grade English teacher warned us against. Sternly.

  JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: intravenious(ly)
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On Feb 23, 2006, at 8:26 AM, Victoria Neufeldt wrote:

> ... Then there's 'mischievious', which has a long and venerable
> history.
> On the other hand, you often hear 'homogenous' for 'homogeneous'. I
> just checked Merriam-Wester's Collegiate: 'homogenous' is there, but
> not 'mischievious'. Could be that people always write 'mischievous'
> even though they say 'mischievious'.

Paul Brians's Common Errors site has an entry that refers only to
pronunciation. but there are 305,000 raw google webhits for the
spelling "mischievious" (as against 6,440,000 for "mischievous"), so
apparently a fair number of people are spelling the way they pronounce.

arnold

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