Words I assumed I had not been misspelling until greeted somewhere by the fact of my wrongness

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Oh, I talked about that on thingy...

In Italian, spelling is not such a big problem - we have a bunch of letters with two possible pronunciations, and the rest of them is always pronounced the same way*. A few words are a bit harder, though:
accelerare (to accelerate), usually pronounced "accellerare";
piovigginare (to drizzle), that almost no one pronounces correctly** ("pioviginare", "piovvigginare", "piovviginare"...);
and collutorio (mouthwash), that gets more google results with the wrong spelling "colluttorio".

* Approximately, of course.
** Including me.

exhuberant!

Being German I write much less English than most of you I guess, so only a few months ago, spell-checking a readme and a changelog file for an OpenSource tool I wrote, I also had the same "separate" epiphany. Had to correct it in almost every file... ^^
"interesting" came out a bit earlier.

I remember once in second grade puzzling over "ov" and "uv" but not arriving at "of". In fifth grade kindergarten knocked me out of the spelling bee.

Tanks, kingran!

This may make you feel better, sarra — my first addition to this list is the most embarrassing: the correct spelling of "seperate" didn't dawn on me until well, well into high school. I still have no idea how, in years of papers, emails and IM conversations, not one person noticed or cared enough to correct me. Yeeearrsss.

Oh, and “flourescent” for me too!

Ooooh. The memory-sticking ones for me are “enviroment” (age 11, but I think I'd barely used it before being told) and “oppurtunity” (somewhere in my teens, which was much more embarrassing).

Intresting and impresive!

Great list, she--and let's face it, most of spellings aren't especially logical in the first place, so you can forgive yourself that much. :-)

Why thank you, miss.
I think it's really one of the most useful self-serving lists to make—I'm digging all the way back to gradeschool (There are words left to add! but I'm pacing myself).. As George Santayana (Google tells me) said, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And now I have this handy reference going.

I love this list. So fresh and honest. :)