I saw this in an emailed advertisement for an instructional designer.
Problem:
The noun is misspelled.
Explanation:
The complete line was “Duration: ASAP – End of Oct. with a possible extention.” — spelled E-X-T-E-N-T-I-O-N.
There is no such word.
Then again, are recruiters supposed to be able to spell?
I believe so, and I believe that a job advertisement with misspellings hurts a recruiter’s reputation.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “extension” — with the letter “s” toward the end — 206,000,000 matches
- “extention” — with the letter “t” toward the end — 5,760,000 matches
This tells me that Web authors have written the noun correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 35.8-to-1, which is bad.
Considering the nearly six million matches for the incorrect spelling, one would have to conclude that the misspelling is a common English blunder.
Solution:
“… with a possible extension.”