Past Tense of “misspell”
The past tense of misspell is misspelled; the past participle is misspelled.
Why “misspell” behaves this way
"Misspell" joins "mis-" to "spell," from Old French "espeller" (to explain or read letter by letter), itself borrowed from Germanic sources related to the older sense of "spell" as a story or set of words recited (the same root that gives us "spell" as in a magic incantation). "Spell" has long had two competing past-tense forms, "spelled" (regularized) and "spelt" (older, retained more in British English), and "misspell" inherits both options from its base verb. Standardized English spelling itself is a comparatively recent development, only really settling down after 18th-century dictionaries like Samuel Johnson's, which means the very concept of a fixed "correct" spelling to misspell against is younger than most people assume.
"Spelt" the past-tense form is unrelated to "spelt" the ancient wheat grain, which is a completely different word from a different root, a coincidence of spelling rather than any shared history — the verb form and the grain simply collided in modern English spelling. The grain "spelt" traces instead to Latin "spelta," an entirely separate word borrowed centuries earlier for a specific ancient wheat variety still grown today in some artisanal baking.
The common confusion
The genuine, live split is dialectal: British English uses "misspelt" about as often as "misspelled," while American English strongly prefers "misspelled" almost exclusively, treating "misspelt" as distinctly British or old-fashioned when it appears in American writing. Spellcheck software adds another layer of confusion, since some programs flag "misspelt" as an outright error rather than recognizing it as a legitimate British variant, frustrating writers who know the form is standard in their own dialect.
How it's actually used
"Misspell" is one of the more frequently self-referential words in English — writers and teachers often joke about the risk of misspelling "misspell" itself, since the word's own double-s and double-l pattern (mis-SPELL, not mis-PELL or mi-SPELL) trips people up in exactly the way the word describes. Spelling-bee culture and autocorrect software have both kept "misspell" in constant circulation, with the noun form "misspelling" appearing in error messages, style guides, and classroom vocabulary lists far more often than most other "mis-" compounds ever do.
Across the tense system
"Misspelled" and "misspelt" are freely interchangeable wherever a past tense or a participle is needed, with no shift in meaning between them, purely a matter of dialect and personal or house-style preference — the same split seen in "spelled/spelt," "learned/learnt," and "dreamed/dreamt." Editors working on international editions of the same book sometimes deliberately swap between the two forms depending on the target market, treating the choice as a localization decision rather than a correction.
Common real mistakes
The most common actual mistake is misspelling "misspell" itself — dropping one of the two s's or one of the two l's ("mispell," "misspel") — a genuinely frequent typo precisely because the correct spelling requires doubling a letter at the exact point where a writer's attention is often already focused on getting spelling right. A second, separate issue is the past-tense split: writers moving between British and American publications sometimes leave an inconsistent mix of "misspelled" and "misspelt" within a single document, which most style guides flag purely for consistency rather than correctness. Learners occasionally also write "misspelled" with only one l, borrowing the single-l spelling of the unrelated word "spelled" incorrectly transferred.
Examples
- She misspelled the client's name on the invoice.
- He has misspelled that word the same way for years without noticing.
- They misspelt "accommodate" throughout the entire British edition.
- The sign misspelled the town's name, to the amusement of visitors.
- I misspelled my own street name on the form, embarrassingly.
- Autocorrect can't catch every misspelled word, especially proper nouns.
- The student had misspelled half the vocabulary list on the quiz.
Memory trick
Remember "misspell" needs two s's back to back — one from "mis-" and one from "spell" — the exact doubling that makes this particular word so ironic to misspell. For the past tense, British writers can reach for "misspelt"; American writers should stick with "misspelled." And keep the unrelated grain "spelt" out of your head entirely — that word has nothing to do with spelling or with this verb's past tense.