But seriously, if you didn't see that word in print and if we asked you to spell it, would you honestly have been able to?

Malay Mail carried out a survey following reports that English will be a subject in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) certificate that students must pass.

Reports indicate that the current rate of failure in the English SPM paper every year is 25 per cent.

Educationists estimate that making the language a compulsory subject to pass will mean that around 30 per cent of the SPM candidates will walk away without a certificate. This could translate into more than 130,000 students without an SPM certificate.

A pass in English has never been compulsory in the SPM. Since 2000, a pass in Bahasa Malaysia was sufficient to get the SPM certificate. Previously, a credit was needed.

Recent reports suggest that many who have expressed their views to the Education Ministry are against the move to make a pass in English compulsory.

Our Survey

FROM the 40 people who took part in our spelling survey, only five managed to get the word "manoeuvre" right -- and three were Malay Mail's news editors.

Furthermore, among those who participated, only two of the 40 managed get all answers correct while at the other end of the spectrum, only one failed miserably getting one of 10 words correct.

Those that sportingly took part in our own version of a 'Street Spelling Bee' were the average man-onthe-street, of various educational backgrounds.

From our survey, we discovered that the top three misspelt words were "manoeuvre" (misspelt as maneuver), "millennium" (misspelt as millenium) and a tie between the words "pronunciation" (misspelt as pronounciation) and "consensus" (misspelt as concensus). (See graphics for more results.)

Interestingly, nearly all respondents said English was their preferred medium of communication.

Twenty-four people were degree holders. The youngest respondent was in Form Four with the Penilaian Menengah Rendah (PMR) certificate as his highest level of qualification while four others had SPM certificates and were pursuing diploma or degree studies.

A commonly given excuse for bad spelling is: "Why do I need to worry about my spelling when I have Microsoft Word Spell Check?"

We gave our respondents 10 words of varying difficulty which are also often misspelt by Malaysians.

On the bright side, most managed to get at least five words correct.

Spelling Face-Off

Our impromptu Spelling Bee had an engineer, a barista and an A-level student battling to outdo each other
on the 10 most misspelt words in the Malaysian vocabulary.

Guess who topped the test?

Student Deborah Augustin, 21, from Petaling Jaya, emerged tops, spelling seven out of the 10 words correctly while the other two had four and five words correct respectively.

Izwan, a degree holder working for Celcom, hesitated the most when faced with words like "phlegm" and "consensus" whereas Chan and Deborah took less time to attempt at spelling the words.

All three failed to spell "manoeuvre" correctly though Chan and Deborah spelt the word correctly in American English. All three also failed to spell the word "pronunciation" correctly.