Mixing up "quiet" and "quite": spelling or grammar error?

Look at this sentence:

It wasn't quiet what I wanted

And this one:

The music was too quite for me

Obviously quiet and quite are mixed up. Is this considered a spelling mistake? In both cases the words are valid, but used in the wrong place.

Is there a special name for these mistakes? Or are they simply grammatical errors?

Solution 1:

They are not grammatical errors since the sentence structure is correct once you replace the erroneous word with the one the author obviously intended.

So I would categorise those mistakes as spelling mistakes influenced by homophone confusion.

Solution 2:

There's no special name for it beyond:

typo.

• 'quiet' and 'quite' mean two very different things; one is an adverb meaning 'very', the other is an adjective mening 'silent'.

• their pronunciations are different enough; in GenAmE, they are not homophones (I don't know about other varieties).

• Transpositino of two characters, especially at teh end of a word, is a very common typing error.

• surely the writers didn't intend the words as written, so they are neither grammatical error or spelling errors.

Solution 3:

I’m not sure whether there is a special name for this kind of spelling mistake, but I’d definitely call it a spelling or typing mistake. The writer would no doubt have pronounced it right in speech. In fact, I suspect that the most common spelling mistakes are those in which a writer subconsciously confuses two similar-sounding words or parts of words, even though he probably knows better, as in *negligable, *interchangible, *percieve, *retreive, *their crazy, *they’re house, *it’s body, *its mine, etc.

Solution 4:

Quiet/Quite might be considered a homophone depending on your accent. Other common homophone (heterograph, specifically) mistakes are:

Their/They're/There
Your/You're
to/too/two