Words

  

Frequently Confused Words

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

—Mark Twain

Here are examples of words whose meaning, usage and spelling have been frequently confused:

accept/except   emigrate/immigrate   track/trek
biannual/biennial   fair/fare   their/there/they're
cite/site/sight   foreword/forward   weather/whether
differ/defer   ingenious/ingenuous   who's/whose
elicit/illicit   stationary/stationery   your/you're

Here are a few of the more frequent ones:

amount/number
fewer/less
much/many

Amount, number, few, less, much and many are words used for expressing quantity. When you use such words (which are called quantifiers), you need to be mindful of the nouns that follow-whether they are countable or uncountable. A very common mistake is to use quantifiers for uncountable nouns to refer to people (who are countable) as illustrated in the above examples.