swill453 wrote:GoSeigen wrote:NomoneyNohoney wrote: Do you think that explains why this happens?
No I'd say autocorrect is to blame.
I'd say only in as much as if you spell a word completely wrong, autocorrect may suggest a correctly-spelled but wrong replacement. Depends how wrong you are in the first place though.
The term "autocorrect" derives from the software automatically correcting misspelt words by changing them to what it reckons is the closest correctly-spelt word. If I remember correctly, merely suggesting corrections rather than automatically applying them was an option that was added very early in the development of most (possibly all) autocorrect software, and depending on exactly which autocorrect software is used, it may be the default option in the software as delivered - or of course a user may have set it as a persistent option long ago and have forgotten that automatic correction was ever in effect. But certainly automatically correcting misspelt words and not merely suggesting corrections is still the default in some circumstances - my Android phone does it in some cases. (And I actually find it quite useful on that phone, because the fiddly small touch keyboard increases both the likelihood of typos and the difficulty of correcting them manually... Though I do get a bit aggravated when it automatically 'corrects' the 3-letter day-of-week abbreviation "Thu" to "The", especially as it doesn't do the same with "Tue"! And whenever I find an automatically-correct-vs-suggest-corrections option on hardware I access via a proper keyboard, I choose the suggest-corrections option...)
So I'd say that it could easily be a case of "defiantly" being an automatic mis-correction of a misspelt version of "definitely".
Gengulphus