Sixty-two per cent of Americans got 'embarrassed' wrong, against 54 per cent of Britons who struggled with the word in a survey last year.

Americans are worse at spelling than Britons, with more than half unable to spell "embarrassed", "liaison¹" and "millennium²".

Despite the popularity of school spelling bee competitions, adults in the US fared poorly in a survey comparing how English speakers on both sides of the Atlantic deal with commonly misspelt words.

Sixty-two per cent of Americans got "embarrassed" wrong, against 54 per cent of Britons who struggled with the word in a survey last year.

Adults in the US performed less well on most of the ten words tested, including millennium (52 per cent wrong, against 43 per cent in UK), liaison (61 per cent to 54 per cent) and "accommodation" (42 per cent to 36 per cent).

Only "definitely" and "friend" were spelt correctly by more Americans.

Professor Edward Baranowski of California State University said that the results reflected the "horrific" drop-out rates of US high schools.

"This certainly puts an eventual³ strain upon the universities, which must devote lots of resources to remedial education," he said.

Jack⁴ Bovill of the Spelling Society, which commissioned the research, said the high inaccuracy rates in both countries showed the need for the English spelling system to be modernized⁵ to improve literacy.

"When asked, only a quarter of adults thought they had a problem with spelling. The answers in the test prove that this is far from the case," he said. "What is holding the UK and the USA back is the irregular spelling system."

The US survey involving a sample of 1,000 adults was carried out online by Ipsos MORI last month, with the method based on a survey of 1,000 Britons in April last year.

美国人在拼写单词方面不如英国人，超过一半的美国人不会拼“embarrassed”、“liaison”和“millennium”。

尽管拼字比赛在美国学校十分流行，但一项比较大西洋两岸说英语人群的调查显示，在拼写容易拼错的单词方面，美国成年人表现得相当糟糕。

调查显示，62%的美国人将“embarrassed”拼错，而去年的一项调查显示，英国有54%的人不会拼写该词。

从十个词的测试结果来看，美国人在大多数词语上的表现不如英国人，其中包括millennium（拼错率：美国52%；英国43%）、liaison（美国61%、英国54%）和accommodation（美国42%、英国36%）。

仅definitely和friend两个词，美国人拼对的比率较高。

加利福尼亚州立大学的爱德华•巴拉诺维斯基教授说，调查结果反映出美国中学“可怕”的辍学率。

他说：“这最终给大学施加了压力，学校必须在补救教育上投入大量资源。”

委托开展该调查的“拼写学会”的杰克•邦维尔说，英美两国在单词拼写方面的高出错率表明，必须推动英语拼写系统的现代化，以提高民众的读写能力。

“在调查过程中，仅有四分之一的成年人觉得自己在单词拼写方面有问题。但测试结果则表明情况要严重得多。不规范的拼写系统是造成这一问题的主要原因。”

这项美国调查由益普索•莫里调查机构于上月在网上开展，共有一千名成年人参加，调查方法主要依据去年四月的一项共有一千名英国人参与的调查。

Vocabulary:

spelling bee:拼字比赛会

drop-out rate:辍学率