Complied and conpiled are easily confused words.
The spell-check application of most word processing software programs would not catch a slip-up of these two words. Spell-check is looking for words that aren’t in its dictionary, and words that resemble words in its dictionary, but are possibly spelled wrong. Spell-check isn’t perfect. It doesn’t know and can’t guess what word you wanted, or what word you meant, it can only judge the words on the page. If you used words that are all spelled correctly, it gives you a pass anyway.
Autocorrect suggests words that start with the same letters. It’s suggesting what word you may want to save time, but quite often, its suggestions are pretty off base. They don’t help you out, but they do make you laugh.
Complied (pronounced “kuhm-pleyed”; rhymes with denied, beside) is the past tense of the verb “comply.” To comply is to agree and obey requirements, restrictions, rules, or limitations. Complied indicates agreement and obedience occurred sometime in the past.
Compiled (pronounced “kuhm-peye-uhled”; rhymes with defiled) is the past tense of the verb “compile.” It means to collect, to put a set together. Compiled indicates something was collected or put together in the past.
The following story uses both words correctly:
Around the millennium, Compton411 was a hot DJ for about a year. He compiled awesome mixes by sourcing tracks from a relatively new thing called a peer to peer sharing service. His preferred service was called Musik4DMasses. His “palette” of songs to mix was well over 200 tracks, and his schedule booked up quickly from word of mouth. He really had an ear for great rhythms and blending them together.
Unfortunately, Musik4DMasses (and services like it) soon found themselves in hot legal waters with record companies and artists. Songs were traded 1000s at a time on a weekly basis, and each trade was a missed sale of their copyrighted work. The service complied with artists requests to have their work removed from the site, but this meant that the marketplace for music was quickly becoming only undiscovered people. There were not hot singles by famous people that users couldn’t wait to get a copy of. Between the legal fees and declining value of its marketplace, Musik4DMasses went bankrupt.
And where did this leave Compton? His awesome mixes were all gone, and his DJing business dried up overnight. So he started looking around at other music business opportunities, and found a recording studio called Condor. Some members of the staff had been to parties where he’d been the DJ, and they liked what they heard, so he was in. Little did Compton know that Condor was at the forefront of a new music trend, Reggaeton, and it would sign some of its hottest artists in the 2000s.
Kathleen W Curry 