When kids misspell words it is called an invented spelling.

When freespellers intentionally misspel a word it is also called an invented spelling.

What is interesting about the invented spellings at www.freespeling.com is that the freespellings are almost always orthographically plausible spellings. They do not deviate that much from the accepted norms.

There are usually 5 ways to spell most English words. In fact there are usually 4 ways to spell most phonemes. Someone reading these plausible misspellings would have no difficulty deciphering them.

Such freespelling was the norm before 1755 when the Johnson dicitonary spelling began to be considered the one way that a word should be spelled.

These high frequency spellings account for 85% of the spellings in dictionary. To see the most likely way that a phoneme is spelled, go to www.foolswisdom.ocm/~sbett/spelling-patterns.htm

It takes only 3-7 months for a child to learn how to spell in most languages. It probably doesn't take much longer to learn how to spell the five most common ways in English.

What is difficult is to remember which of the plausible spellings is "correct". Which spelling matches the lexical spelling.