15 Famous Thinkers Who Couldn’t Spell

Words can be tricky things, often spelled quite differently than how they sound, coming from foreign languages with different sets of rules, or being just plain weird. It's no wonder then that so many people struggle with spelling, even those who are generally regarded as having some seriously brilliant minds. No, it's not just grade-schoolers, college students, and the everyday man who struggles with the age old "i before e" dilemma, but also scientists, writers, and world leaders. Here, you'll find a list of great thinkers who made great strides in their respective fields, but never could quite conquer the perils of spelling.

1. Alfred Mosher Butts

   Unfamiliar with this name? Well, you're probably familiar with what he created, though it might surprise you to learn that Butts was a bad speller. He created the iconic and still quite popular game Scrabble, which requires one to be adept at spelling. The inventor himself was admittedly not the best speller, often scoring only 300 points on average in a game of Scrabble.

2. William Faulkner

   Faulkner wasn't a truly terrible speller, but if you take a look at his original manuscripts there are some definite errors the iconic Southern author wouldn't have wanted to see in print. Despite setting many of his famous books and short stories in the difficult to spell and pronounce Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner's editors confirm that despite their repeated attempts to point out his mistakes, he made spelling errors all through his career.

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald

   Few writers are so known for their bad spelling as Fitzgerald. How bad, you say? Fitzgerald wasn't even able to spell the name of one of his closest friends, Hemingway, often misaddressing him in correspondence and papers as "Earnest Hemminway." The editor of his collected letters called him a "lamentable speller" who struggled with words like "definite" and "criticism." Still, his poor spelling didn't seem to do the author any harm, and many of his works are regarded as literary masterpieces today.

4. Ernest Hemingway

   Ernest Hemingway may not have had much room to judge when it came to his friend Fitzgerald not spelling his name correctly. Long before the days of spell check, Hemingway had to rely on newspaper and book editors to catch his mistakes, a job which they often complained would be a lot easier if he would make an effort to spell things correctly (though Hemingway retorted that that's what they were being paid to do).

Read More...