spell "aggravate"

Yesterday a friend of mine asked me while he was taking a call how to spell the word aggravate. You see in our business words have to be spelled correctly and every word should be typed or enunciated verbatim. I looked at his computer screen and contemplated at his spelling:

aggrievate

If history was tweaked differently this word would have found itself in Merriam-Webster or Oxford, the marriage of aggrieve and aggravate. I researched the etymology of both words in Merriam-Webster. I found out that aggrieve is derived either from middle English agreven, from Anglo-French agrever, and from Latin aggravare, meaning "to make heavier". As for aggravate, it is derived from the Latin aggravatus, which is the past participle of aggravare.

So as not to burden my friend with the period of waiting for my response, I advised him that the correct spelling was aggravate. I cannot blame my friend. Aggrieve and aggravate sounds very similar, being that both share the same ancestor word aggravare. It is quite interesting to learn that we might sometimes unconsciously misspell a word and if little research is done it actually makes sense why the word is misspelled.