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I absolutely cringe when I read advertisements offering items "For Sell" rather than "For Sale."

I do not claim to have a good command of grammar, spelling, or appropriate American English usage. I did work hard to acquire the limited skills I posses, and so it bothers me deeply when I regularly read "Sale" in place of "Sell" in ad. What happened? Why is this happening?

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  • Maybe it is Spanglish, with there now being so many people in the US whose first language is Spanish, and with the WSJ recently reporting that 10% of US job seekers have limited English ability.
    – curious-proofreader
    Commented Sep 26, 2014 at 7:40
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    Can you show some evidence of these ads? I've never seen one.
    – curiousdannii
    Commented Sep 26, 2014 at 7:58
  • @curiousdannii Here's a Nairaland advert from Nigeria. Click the link at your own risk.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Commented Sep 26, 2014 at 8:10
  • @AndrewLeach that was . . . quite something.
    – Soham Chowdhury
    Commented Sep 26, 2014 at 8:49
  • I saw my sister using that, since she's not exactly bright in English (we're Indonesians) I thought it's just another case of particularly bad Engrish, but if this has been spotted in "common usage" maybe English language is starting to crumble
    – Raestloz
    Commented Sep 26, 2014 at 10:30

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I would bet that this is an issue of pronunciation creeping into the written word. If you found the authors of those "for sell" ads and talked to them for a while, you would likely find they pronounce the word 'sale' the way they spelled it: 'sell'. Also likely: they are not voracious readers.

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  • This sounds plausible to me. As a child, my sister consistently pronounced -ale and -ail words (like whale and fail) as if they were spelled -ell (like whell and fell). She didn't have trouble with any other pronunciation, but she had to go to speech therapy for a while to get her whales and fails right. I wonder if -ale/-ell confusion is recognized as a particular phonetic difficulty, and whether there is a name for it at this level of granularity.
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Sep 26, 2014 at 23:54
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This is very common in Utah, where I live. In the local accent, "sale" is pronounced like "sell" and "whale" like "well."

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