A definately different humorous approach to vocabulary and spelling from xkcd

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The December 22, 2023 xkcd web comic claims that rather than just definitely there is a spectrum of a dozen words expressing various degrees of definiteness, as is shown above. The orthodox view in an article from Proofed on March 6, 2022 titled Spelling Tips: Definitely or Definately? instead is:

“It’s easy to misspell ‘definitely’ as ‘definately’ because the word isn’t pronounced exactly as it’s spelled. The second ‘I’ sounds like ‘uh’ when it’s spoken, so people often wrongly assume that the vowel after the ‘n’ should be an ‘a.’ After all, that’s how we spell a lot of other words with the same sound, such as immediately, accurately, and approximately.

However, if you remove the suffix ‘ly’ from those words, you’re left with the correctly spelled immediate, accurate, and approximate. But you won’t find definate in the dictionary!”