Teriffic
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A recent congratulatory email, from a successful scientist to a member of his lab:
Teriffic!
I make similar mistakes myself all the time, and felt the need to check that the correct spelling is actually "terrific".
See "Conservation of (orthographic) gemination" (3/29/2004) for a nerdish exploration of the psycholinguistic issues involved.
And for more examples:
"The perils of degemination" (3/29/2004)
"Jeniffer afficionados" (3/30/2004)
"Conservation of gemination: Another example" (6/7/2004)
"Conservation of orthographic gemination, again" (9/10/2019)
See also "Orthographic metathesis" (3/1/2004).
Among other things, this is evidence that the "tokenization" of letter strings in human brains is not the same at the tokenization developed in AI datacenters.
Jenny Chu said,
September 25, 2026 @ 7:23 am
Those of us who have read Charlotte's Web know exactly how to spell it! Double T, double E, double R…
J.W. Brewer said,
September 25, 2026 @ 7:57 am
You can find Out There some instances of Oddesa for Odessa, consistent with the general hypothesis. Although now the data is distorted by the recent politically-motivated anti-doubling trend in favor of just "Odesa," aimed at matching the Ukrainian spelling Одеса and disowning the Russian spelling Одесса. AFAIK that's just because of different orthographic conventions and Ukrainian hostility to orthographic-doubling-in-general – it doesn't signal a relevant pronunciation difference. (The Russian spelling is closer to the ancient Greek toponym Οδησσός, which was evoked for marketing purposes when the current city was founded in the 18th century.)
Also in combinations, like "Lake Oddesa" for Lake Odessa, Mich., or "Oddesa Beulah" for the racehorse Odessa Beulah which achieved success on the track circa 1938.
Jerry Packard said,
September 25, 2026 @ 8:42 am
Yeah, it happens all the time. It’s interesting to observe that in our ‘orthographic lexicons’ for lack of a better term – we encode the fact that there is a germinate C or V graph, and then misapply the position of gemination.
Alexander Browne said,
September 25, 2026 @ 10:11 am
For me it's reccomend … I mean recommend. Once I see it I know it's wrong but my fingers want to type it and sometimes writing by hand I can't remember until I see it.
KeithB said,
September 25, 2026 @ 12:25 pm
Jenny Chu:
"Those of us who have read Charlotte's Web know exactly how to spell it! Double T, double E, double R…"
I just hear Agnes Moorehead's voice…
ulr said,
September 25, 2026 @ 2:13 pm
That's why Ukrainian has spellings like Вінниця and Запоріжжя. It's simply that these are different languages, with different grammars, not some stupid "hostility to orthographic doubling".
NW said,
September 25, 2026 @ 3:15 pm
And then there's the odd one like ??harrassment, where the pronunciation is also unsettled, so you have to really pause and savour all the options.
Viseguy said,
September 25, 2026 @ 4:03 pm
My spelling of embarrass has often left me em-bare-assed.
Chris Button said,
September 26, 2026 @ 8:20 am
Based on how these machines have been developed, the comparison is not valid. Aren't tokenized letter strings nowadays usually word-boundary agnostic too?
Would an unsuccessful scientist be expected to fare differently? :)
An association with "terror" makes the spelling easier to remember — I think we should all learn some basic etymology when learning how to spell as children.
David Morris said,
September 27, 2026 @ 7:16 am
And of course it's been a long time since 'terrific' exclusively meant 'causing terror'. Google Ngrams lists terrific job, speed, force, explosion, storm, fire, heat, struggle, power and grandeur, some of which may need more context to decide which meaning is meant.
Steve Griffin said,
September 27, 2026 @ 8:57 pm
Decades of thinking I was the only person who had to stop and think every time I spelled Jennifer have ended today. I am out and proud, albeit with tears of relief streaming down my face.
Michael Watts said,
September 28, 2026 @ 9:27 am
Well, the answer can never be "causing terror"; that's not a sense of the word in any modern context. In "terrific job" it means "good" (at a very intensified level), in the others it's basically just a strong intensifier.
Terrific job: excellent job
Terrific speed: really fast speed
Terrific storm: really stormy storm
Terrific struggle: really struggly struggle
Terrific power: extreme power
Philip Taylor said,
September 28, 2026 @ 10:46 am
Oh, come on Michael, you can do better than that for the last —"Terrific power: really powerful power", surely ?
Michael Watts said,
September 28, 2026 @ 1:14 pm
That would be nice, but I get caught on the idea that "powerful" describes whoever or whatever wields the power rather than describing the power itself.
Jerry Friedman said,
September 29, 2026 @ 3:24 pm
"Terrific" is a bad one for me, though other "-ific" adjectives help, and "embarrass" is another, but the worst is "sheriff". For some years, if I remember correctly, I thought it had to have a double r because of the etymology from the ancestors of "shire" and "reeve", as in Tolkien's "Shirriff".
HS said,
September 29, 2026 @ 7:04 pm
I often spell "broccoli" with two l's and one c, rather than two c's and one l. Similarly I sometimes spell "zucchini" with two n's and one c, instead of two c's and one n (and to make it worse, I also tend to leave out the h). Sometimes I just can't remember and I resort to "courgette" instead!
"Odyssey" with its one d, two s's, and two y's gives me trouble and I often start spelling it with "odd", but then I think of "Odysseus" and it becomes clear.
At the risk of nit-picking, the linked Language Log post from 2004 contains an example of a different type of orthographic conservation in that "conservation of gemination" is at one point mis-spelt as "conversation of gemination" – a conservation of the v and the s but in a different order!
Well, the answer can never be "causing terror"; that's not a sense of the word in any modern context.
I think it's still possible to use "terrific" in the sense of causing terror in expressions like "terrific storm", "terrific fire", or terrific explosion", if it is given the right rhetorical force and the right tone contour. Certainly it would be very rare in that sense compared to the usual modern sense of "good" or "large", but for me it's still definitely possible. (I'm a New Zealander and I believe David Morris is Australian, so maybe the original sense has held on a bit longer in this part of the world compared to in America.) It's true that for the sense of "causing terror" I would probably normally say "terrifying storm [etc]", but I could and would sometimes say "terrific storm" instead because I think there is at least a difference in rhetorical strength between "terrifying storm" and "terrific [in the sense of causing terror] storm", in the same way that I think there is a difference in rhetorical strength between "horrifying storm" and "horrific storm". "Horrifying storm" means horrifying to me or other people, while "horrific storm" means horrific in and of itself and feels stronger and more evil to me, and I think that is also true of "terrific storm" versus "terrifying storm".
Jim said,
September 30, 2026 @ 5:11 pm
Channeling Charlotte's Web (and fixing the excesses) is the only way I manage to spell it right
Cris Chatterjee said,
October 1, 2026 @ 1:45 pm
It always surprises me that 'terrific' has two 'r's and one 'f'. After all, 'traffic' also begins with a 'ch' sound but has one 'r' and two 'f's. Go figure!