This thread is very amusing to me.
I don't have a specific memory of being taught "dilemna", but I remember seeing it as "dilemma" at some point in adulthood and thinking "oh, that's wrong", and then later getting nabbed on a spell check and thinking "err, what?" I checked into it and saw "dilemma" everywhere and thought to myself "gee, weird, I really thought it was dilemna, but I guess not, hunh".
And there the matter has stood until this thread. Now I guess I need to put myself into the group of "yeah, I **SWEAR** I was taught 'dilemna'"
Another thread on this same topic here:
http://forum.thefreedictionary.com/p...g-dilemna.aspx, and one post has this:
Quote:
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Originally Posted by from other forum
I just read a bunch of online discussions of this phenomenon, and people reported being taught dilemna in the US, Canada, and Great Britain from the fifties through the eighties. There appears to be a similar situation in French between dilemme and dilemne. The weird thing to me is how all of this mis-education could have happened in so many classes without one contrarian student being doubtful enough to look up the spelling in a dictionary. As far as I know, no one has ever been able to track the problem down to a misprint in a textbook, and there seems to be no dictionary anywhere any time that has listed dilemna.
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