Commonly misspelled words in German Commonly misspelled words in German Misspellings in German are a subcategory of orthographical errors (German: "Rechtschreibfehler"), counter the rules of German orthography. Although there is some variance following the current 'optional' status of the German spelling reform of 1996. Misspelling in German is less common than in English since most words are spelled as they are pronounced. Exceptions however occur, as for the (in modern German) identical "ä" and "e" both representing the IPA [ε] sound. Confusion can also occur with homonyms as verb prefixes: "wiederspiegeln" (incorrect) vs. "widerspiegeln" (correct). Misspellings of German words, outside Germany, also occur - for
Longest word in English Sylvia Plath made mention of it in her semi-autobiographical novel "The Bell Jar", when the protagonist was reading "Finnegans Wake". "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", the 34-letter title of a song from the movie "Mary Poppins", does appear in several dictionaries, but only as a proper noun defined in reference to the song title. The attributed meaning is "a word that you say when you don't know what to say." The idea and invention of the word is credited to songwriters Robert and Richard Sherman. The English language permits the legitimate extension of existing words to serve new purposes by the addition of prefixes