Perhaps spell-checkers are to blame for the shocking statistic that less than twenty percent of native English speakers can spell these six words correctly:
Accommodation, business, height, necessary, separate, sincerely.
As an English tutor, I know that spelling in English is often confusing for my students. It is, in fact, more complex and irregular (as well as eccentric) than pretty much any other written language. More than one-tenth of English words are not spelt the way they sound. This is partly due to pronunciation of words changing through the centuries whereas the spellings were left intact, hence the reason why so many written and spoken English words do not seem to correlate. The fact that English is not spelt by phonic rules (or common sense it seems) makes it the hardest European language to learn to read and write.
Not that I am complaining (very much) as such news means that my services will continue to be in demand for some time to come. :-)
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