Forum: english.stackexchange.com
Tags: <grammar><orthography><terminology><errors>
Title: Mixing up "quiet" and "quite": spelling or grammar error?
Question: Look at this sentence:   It wasn't  quiet  what I wanted   And this one:   The music was too  quite  for me   Obviously  quiet  and  quite  are mixed up. Is this considered a spelling mistake? In both cases the words are valid, but used in the wrong place.   Is there a special name for these mistakes? Or are they simply grammatical errors?

Answers:
sents: text: They are not grammatical errors since the sentence structure is correct once you replace the erroneous word with the one the author obviously intended.
text: So I would categorise those mistakes as spelling mistakes influenced by homophone confusion.
answer_details: author: english.stackexchange.com/users/2614/RedGrittyBrick
score: 9
sents: text: I’m not sure whether there is a special name for this kind of spelling mistake, but I’d definitely call it a spelling or typing mistake.
text: The writer would no doubt have pronounced it right in speech.
text: In fact, I suspect that the most common spelling mistakes are those in which a writer subconsciously confuses two similar-sounding words or parts of words, even though he probably knows better, as in * negligable , * interchangible , * percieve ,
text: *retreive,
text: * their crazy , * they’re house , *
text: it
text: ’s body , *
text: its mine , etc.
answer_details: author: english.stackexchange.com/users/3036/Cerberus_Reinstate_Monica
score: 2
sents: text: There's no special name for it beyond: typo.
text: 'quiet' and 'quite' mean two very different things; one is an adverb meaning 'very', the other is an adjective mening 'silent'.
text: their pronunciations are different enough; in GenAmE, they are not homophones (I don't know about other varieties).
text: Transpositino of two characters, especially at teh end of a word, is a very common typing error.
text: surely the writers didn't intend the words as written, so they are neither grammatical error or spelling errors.
answer_details: author: english.stackexchange.com/users/4972/Mitch
score: 2
sents: text: Quiet/Quite might be considered a homophone depending on your accent.
text: Other common homophone (heterograph, specifically) mistakes are: Their/They're/
text: There Your/You're to/too/two
answer_details: author: english.stackexchange.com/users/3433/Stephen Furlani
score: 1
sents: text: Since it's the person's intention to use it in a certain context, it is a misspelling.
text: If they were convinced that that was the way it was spelled, however, and spelled it that way, it would be a lexical error.
answer_details: author: english.stackexchange.com/users/363829/Marcus Hendriksen
score: 1
sents: text: Semantic error.
text: Meaning is not logical.
answer_details: author: english.stackexchange.com/users/24666/Chris
score: 0

Summary of the answers:
These are not grammatical errors since the sentence structure is correct once you replace the erroneous word with the correct one. As a result, these are probably spelling mistakes influenced by homophone confusion. Aside from the word "typo", there is probably no special word for this. Some people would also call this a semantic error since the meaning is not logical.
This could be seen as a spelling mistake and this may be due to the similarity of pronunciation. It could also be considered to be a lexical error. However, it is not a grammatical error, but a semantic error, because the sentence structure is correct.
This may be referred to as a typo, a spelling mistake, a misspelling or a semantic error.
These are not considered grammatical errors and are instead viewed as spelling mistakes. It is unclear whether there is a special term for this type of mistake but possible terms include "typo" and "semantic error".