: A mark consisting of the letters sp enclosed in an oval is commonly used by teachers (and some professors) in the United States to call a misspelling to the student's attention. But as you

@Shelley992

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A mark consisting of the letters sp enclosed in an oval is commonly used by teachers (and some professors) in the United States to call a misspelling to the student's attention. But as you note, the standard meaning of that mark under U.S. proofreading conventions is "spell out", and it appears in the margin of the same line where the proofreader or copy editor has circled a symbol, an abbreviation, or some other short-form word to be spelled out at full length.

Peggy Smith, Proofreading Manual & Reference Guide (1981) gives three examples of this "instruction to spell out"—in which the circled inline element is (1) the entire expression "3 in." (to be corrected to read "three inches"), (2) the ¢ symbol in "5¢" (to be corrected to read "5 cents"), and (3) the abbreviation "N.J." (to be corrected to read "New Jersey").

But proofreaders, copy editors, and typesetters don't have a widely recognized mark to indicate "misspelling"—and the reason they don't is that in a professional setting, markup is not done to point out mistakes in the work to its author for later correction by that person. Instead, the point is to correct the errors as quickly as possible.

So if a proofreader (using common U.S. style conventions) comes across the spelling millenium, rather than taking time to label it a typo, he or she will simply add a caret mark (^) beneath the line between the n and the second i and mark an n above the line for insertion there.

If the proofreader encounters the spelling senetence for sentence, he or she will draw a delete line through the extra e. For the typo recieve, he or she will draw a transposition line indicating that the order of the i and the second e should be reversed. And if the spelling is truly mangled, such as numoanya for pneumonia, he or she will draw a line through the entire word and write the correct spelling above it.

Wikipedia provides a rather brief list of proofreader's marks on its page devoted to that subject. EspressoGraphics.com has a somewhat more detailed list of marks on its site.

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