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
Letter frequency word variants when counting, such as "abstracts", "abstracted" and "abstracting" and not just the root word of "abstract". This system results in letters like "s" appearing much more frequently, such as when counting letters from lists of the most used English words on the Internet. A final variant is to count letters based on their frequency of use in actual texts, resulting in certain letter combinations like "th" becoming more common due to the frequent use of common words like "the". Absolute usage frequency measures like this are used when creating keyboard layouts or letter frequencies in old fashioned printing