to license / the most frequently misspelled word in German language
We all agree that German grammar was made by the devil himself – and he was not in a good mood. When it comes to spelling however, my mother’s tongue is far less diabolic. The german orthography is pretty straightforward indeed, once you have wrapped your head around some basic rules.
Nevertheless, there are some special cases that seem a bit tricky – up to the point where more than 50 percent of the German population misspell them, according to the editors of the semi-official German dictionary ”Duden”. This is the case with lizenzieren, which, to be honest, I just now found out that I had written wrong my whole life. Like many of my fellow Germans, I was tricked by the fact that it resembles the word zensieren (“to censor”) a lot – the fact that the English word “to license” is spelled with an s instead of a z might add to the effect.
Other entries in this list include akquirieren (to acquire, often misspelled “aquirieren”) or Rhythmus, where one of the h’s is often omitted. If you think that this makes German a language with a complicated spelling, you might be able to explain why the English words “tough” and “though” differ in only a single letter.
References:
https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Häufig-falsch-geschriebene-Fremdwörter
