Mischievous and mischievious mean the same thing; however, the former is considered correct and the latter a misspelling. (In fact, as I wrote this blog post, my composer kept placing a red underline under each occurrence of mischievious.)
But not so fast.
Let’s start with mischievous. It’s pronounced like miss • chu • vus, but occasionally, you might hear someone pronounce the chuh as chee and add in an extra syllable. All of a sudden, it sounds like miss • chee • vee • us.
Naturally, this creative pronunciation has led to creative spelling, with people often spelling mischievous as mischievious. Here’s the thing though: mischievious isn’t a recent abomination. This spelling has been around for over 400 years.
Take a look at this page from John Rushworh’s Historical collections of private passages of state Weighty matters in law, which was written in 1692.
That’s the earliest recording I could find, but there are others from the same period. So, this spelling — and presumably, this pronunciation — has been around for quite some time.
Maybe instead of insisting that mischievious is misspelled, we should be asking how long must a spelling — or a pronunciation for that matter — persist for us to consider it an alternative spelling rather than a misspelling.
English has plenty of words with more than one spelling. Canadians, of all people, should be aware of that. Is it color or colour? Is it disc or disk? Is it theatre or theater?
Or what about barbecue and barbeque, donut and doughnut, nite and night, thru and through. And we can’t forget everyone’s favourite: yogurt. Or is it yoghurt? Although it could be yogourt or maybe even yoghourt.
Certainly, we can be fine with more than one spelling (and pronunciation) for mischievous.
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