The Guardian | Where to stick grocer's apostrophe

According to a press release from Oxford University Press (OUP), only 8% of the population places "unnecessary, misplaced or omitted apostrophes in the words 'its' and 'it's' . . .."

This kind of apostrophe misuse is called—in Britain—the grocer's apostrophe because of rampant, irregular, and incorrect apostrophes sprinkled on storefront signs. (E.g. price's slashed.) May the grocer's apostrophe rest in peace.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that we have replaced this error with a list of common word confusion:

• diffuse | defuse (50% commit this error)


• rein | reign (26%)


• tow | toe (21%)


• pouring | poring (12%)


• pedal | peddle


• draw | drawer


• compliment | complement


• there | they're | their

OUP ranks the common errors by examining its 300m-word database. An OUP representative suggests that electronic spellcheckers may be part of the problem:

This seems to be something of a new situation. These errors are occurring in texts that are otherwise quite well spelt, possibly because of the increasing use of spellcheckers. Spellcheckers can tell you whether a word is correctly spelt—but not whether it is properly used.