"Right" and "wrong" are adverbs as well as adjectives. "Spell wrong" and
"spell right" are both standard English. As Casey Stengal used to say,
"You could look it up."

________________________________

Richard Veit
Department of English
University of North Carolina Wilmington

-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of MCJ
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006 2:57 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: How not to spell wrong

I saw this on another list, from someone berating another poster's 
language skills,

"... people are still going to disapprove of you if you spell wrong,
write?"

So I went to Google for a quick check:

"spell wrong" got more than 26,000 hits

"spell incorrectly" got about 9,000 hits

and "spell wrongly" got less than 700 hits.

That's more or less what I'd expect to find. So, what is happening 
here?  Do you flag "spell wrong", "act wrong", "play wrong" as errors? 
Are spell, act, play suddenly nouns? Or, is wrong now an adjective form?

Omar

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