How Many Ways Can YOU Misspell Vegetarian?

abcIf you’ve been thinking about going vegetarian or vegan, here’s a novel reason to choose vegan: it’s easier to spell.

Here’s a challenge for you. Think about all the different ways you could misspell ‘vegetarian.’ Now if you multiply that number by three you’ll have an idea of the number of variations I’ve seen online.

Here are some of the most frequent offenders:

vegeterian
vegiterian
vegatarian
veggetarian

But there’s also:

veggietarian
vegahtarian
vejatarian

And my personal favorite:

fegatarian

Fegatarian! Didn’t even get the first letter right! I thought most people could get it from the root word, ‘vegetable.’ But it seems people have trouble with that too, vegtable and vegtible being among the horrors I’ve witnessed.

Don’t get me wrong. I can’t spell to save myself. If it weren’t for the trusty spell-check, someone else would be writing this post about me. And I realise there are a lot of people using this word for whom English is not their first language. I of course would be struggling to find the word for ‘vegetarian’ if I was in Europe or South America, let alone be able to spell it. This is a light-hearted post. Relax.

Actually I’ve been looking at the word so long now I can’t remember which is the correct version. Spell-check!

- George

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  1. ute-elisabeth’s avatar

    hmmm, i wonder, if i shall post a comment, because i see no other comments on the whole site.

    in fact, it is végétarien in french, vegetarier in german & vegetarano in esperanto, et cetera pp.

    we germans even make differences between female & male vegetarians
    —> male singular:vegetarier,
    —> male plural: vegetarier,
    —> female singular: vegetarierin
    —> female plural: vegetarierinnen
    —> we add a g for the nickname: veggie.

    there is no such thing as the vege- vegi- vegathing. so even assuming that english isn’t everybodies mother tongue, we have a supra-regional scale, called the latinum, in which, i believe, the mother-verb has its roots in —> vegetare vitalize, belebend
    so i feel good with the idea, that all the spells have a home in the nickname-sphere.

    cheers, u-e

  2. George’s avatar

    Hi Ute, thanks for this. Yes I forgot all about the whole issue of gender in languages, and the latinum is welcome news to me. By the way, there are lots of comments on the site but you have to click on individual posts before you see them.