I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this easy-to-avoid grammatical error. Almost once daily at least, someone writes something that uses one of the following incorrectly-spelled words:
infinate, definate, infinately, definately
I sort of “get it.” But there are two things that should make it obvious quickly that those are the incorrect spellings:
1. When there is a vowel, followed by a single consonant, followed by a vowel, that first vowel takes the long form. The above incorrect words, the “ate” part would be pronounced like the past-tense of “eat”… (as in, “I ate a burrito for lunch”), or like the number eight.
Which is obviously incorrect… you would never say, “in – fin – eight”.
2. To me, this is the more important one. The base word for those misspelled words is “finite”, which is something having a limit. Even though a lot of people have heard this word, they don’t make the connection. Part of this is because of the difference in pronunciation. “Finite” is pronounced “fie – night”, whereas “Infinite” is pronounced “In – fin – it”. Long “i” for both in the former, and short “i” for both in the latter.
But if you remember that things can be “finite”, you should be able to remember that by contrast, other things can be “infinite”. You don’t change the spelling of the base word just because you add a prefix to it. It still contains the word “finite”, as does “definite.”
Image credit: DMTek Group, digital art by Ariel Duren
