Separated by a Common Language

The people at WordUnscrambler.pro sent me a list of "the most misspelled (BrE misspelt*) words" for the UK. I get a lot of these "we did this thing so that your blog will give us free advertising," and I usually ignore them, but I'll give this one some attention—partly because they sent a US list to Language Log (who published it), so I can do some comparison. 

But I first have to gripe a bit. Here's the methodology:

We analyzed Jan 1, 2025 - Dec 17, 2025 search data from Google Trends for "How do you spell" and "How to spell".

That's not a method for discovering the "most misspelled words." That's a method for discovering the most looked-up spellings. This is the kind of (BrE) jiggery-pokery makes me hate headlines.  If you think to look up a word, then you might be insecure or curious about its spelling. But that's keeping you from misspelling it. I'm betting that when they're not looking up spellings like these, those people are out in the world (like the rest of us) are confidently spelling accommodation with one m and letting spellcheck catch it for them (or not).

Nevertheless, the WU.pro folks showed admirable linguistic sensitivity in not declaring the Americanisms on the list "misspelled." Instead, they note repeatedly that both the US and UK variants "are correct". 

United Kingdom's most misspelled words queried spellings:

1.     Colour - 109 200 searches - Both colour and color are correct.

2.     Favourite - 82 900 searches - Both favourite and favorite are correct.

3.     License - 59 000 searches.

4.     Diarrhoea - 58 700 searches - Both diarrhoea and diarrhea are correct.

5.     Jewellery - 56 400 searches.

6.     Definitely - 53 000 searches.

7.     Auntie - 50 400 searches - Both auntie and aunty are correct.

8.     Weird - 48 000 searches.

9.     Business - 46 800 searches.

10.   Behaviour - 40 800 searches - Both behaviour and behavior are correct.

11.   Neighbour - 39 600 searches - Both neighbour and neighbor are correct.

12.   Country - 29 000 searches.

13.   Queue - 22 800 searches.

14.   Gorgeous - 22 600 searches.

15.   Necessary -  23 000 searches.

I've added the blue to show which ones are also on the US top 10, which I've copied at the bottom of this post.† (Not sure why the UK got a top 15 and the US a top 10. Nor why necessary has more searches but is lower on the list than queue.) 

Some of these are definitely difficult—others, like country, surprised me. But let's have a little look at whether people do misspell them, using the Corpus of Global Web-Based English. (I'm using that one even though it's 13 years old now because web-based English is more likely to include misspellings than the published writing in other comparative corpora.) I won't try to cover all of them, just the ones that strike me as transatlantically interesting.

US/UK variants

-or/-our 

In that vein, the following graph shows that there's probably more AmE writing on UK websites than BrE writing on AmE websites—which is not so surprising, since there are presumably about 5 times more US than UK writers on the internet and text from American wire services and other companies might be reprinted wholesale on UK sites.

rates of -our versus -or spellings in GloWbE

But the other thing to take from the our/or chart is: Canadian spelling is in crisis. The (standard Canadian) -our spellings only just outnumber the -or ones. Meanwhile, the Canadian Prime Minister recently got into trouble for using British -ise spellings that are not traditionally Canadian. 
 

Licence/license

License is a tricky one because it's the correct spelling for BrE, if it is a verb. But it is licence in BrE when it is a noun (s in AmE for both).  In the first chart here, it's clear that there's a lot of license as a noun in the GB corpus—but that will, again, be partly due to American writing on British websites, rather than British writers misspelling it:

I was surprised not to see practise on the UK misspelling list. You can read more about that at an older post, if you like.

Diarrhea/diarrhoea

This one seems to have little to do with US/UK confusion. Diarrh(o)ea is just difficult and unpleasant for everyone:

jewellery/jewelry

The later jewellery spelling seems to have derived from jeweller + y ('the stuff that the jeweller makes'—analogous to pottery) while jewelry derives from jewel+ry ('products created from jewels'—analogous to pastry, balladry). In 1901, the OED commented (about BrE usage): 

In commercial use commonly spelt jewellery; the form jewelry is more rhetorical and poetic, and unassociated with the jeweller. But the pronunciation with three syllables is usual even with the former spelling.

Words that are just hard to spell

Weird

It's been my perception that weird is more a problem in UK spelling, and GloWbE bears that out a little bit, with wierd a greater proportion of the UK data (about 3%) than the US (about 2%):

country

queue

The word is much more common in BrE, but hard to spell everywhere—and yet, people seem to mostly get it right. Leaving off the final e sometimes happens, but really not much:

You'd also expect to find the word spelled like its homonyms cue and Q, but there aren't many such misspellings. For the following chart, I searched for queue, queu, que, Q and cue, but none of the queu spellings showed up in the 'in a' phrasing: