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 wordsqueried 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.
Postscript : On the same day as I wrote this post, another company released its (much better) analysis of British misspellings. See the bottom of this post for more on that.
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.
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| 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, when it is a verb. But it is licence in BrE when it is a noun (s in AmE for both). The first chart here shows a lot of (incorrect for BrE) 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. It's hard to know how much each factor contributes.
 |
So, more interesting from a misspelling standpoint is licenced, which is incorrect in all Englishes, but about 5% of the UK spellings. License is definitely a word that Britons misspell. |
I was surprised not to see practice/practise on the UK misspelling list. You can read more about that at an older post, if you'd like to.
Diarrhea/diarrhoea
This one seems to have little to do with US/UK confusion. Diarrh(o)ea is just difficult and unpleasant for everyone. And personal: everybody's misspelling it their own ways:
(The crossed-out ones are names that happened to be caught on my search for "diarr*a". I don't envy them their diarr-a names.)
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.
So, we might consider jewelry to be AmE and old-fashioned BrE.
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 forms (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:
 |
I'd expected 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:
The Q spelling might be an abbreviation, rather than a misspelling. But it's striking that the cue homonym is absent from the British entirely. These people know a queue's a queue.
I'm going to leave it there! But feel free to comment on these or the other words on the lists.
Footnotes
* The fact that misspelled/misspelt has two spellings complicates the old joke: Which word is always misspelled? Misspelled! (Or is it misspelt?) Anyway, I have an old post on -ed versus -t past tenses.
† The American list, via Language Log:
America's most misspelled words:
- Definitely – 33 500 searches.
- Separate – 30 000 searches.
- Necessary – 29 000 searches.
- Believe – 28 500 searches.
- Through – 28 000 searches.
- Gorgeous – 27 000 searches.
- Neighbor – 25 500 searches.
- Business – 24 200 searches.
- Favorite – 23 000 searches.
- Restaurant – 22 500 searches.
Postscript (28 Feb): Another study!
Around 530 million spelling attempts from 936,926 pupils across the country were examined by education platform EdShed to draw their results, determining which words schoolchildren find most tricky. (The Independent)
Their list has only two overlaps with the WordUnscrambler one:
Posts
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ReplyDeleteThe homophone I'm seeing a lot recently is there for their but I think that is one person on a website I frequent (and I am one who often gets homophones wrong).
ReplyDeleteMind you, I'm seeing gonna for going to so often these days, it'll soon be standard English.
There was a book about wordplay published in the late 1990s that scoured the internet via search engines to try to answer the question of which word is least often spelled correctly -- not exactly the same question (but perhaps actually getting closer to answering it than by seeing what words people asked about). By their results, the clear winner was "desiccate", which had an abysmally low percentage of accurate spellings. (Frankly, I found this a bit surprising. My guess would have been "fuchsia", which can be misspelled in three or four different plausible-looking ways.)
ReplyDeleteThe fuchsia conundrum is only because the English pronunciation is appalling. It was named after a Mr. Fuchs, whose name translates to Mr Fox and which is pronounced Foox. So going by that it should be pronounced foox-ya, which would reduce the possible spelling variants. Although I admit that German chs for x is still unintuitive for speakers of English.
DeleteIn Dutch, the pronunciation is usually fuk-sia. But when I dropped that among English-speakers, they were horrified!
DeleteI'm not surprised.
DeleteFrankly I didn't know that country was a difficult word, but that one variant throws a whole new light on, ahem, country matters.
ReplyDeleteThe most common misspelling of country I see as an editor and proofreader is "county."
DeleteIt is suggested that when Shakespeare referred to "country matters" he meant sex.
DeleteMost often I stop to think about the internal -ie- and -ei- words and whisper to myself the schoolroom chant i before e except after c or pronounced as a as in neighbor or weigh and inveigh. (I added inveigh.)
ReplyDeleteI still remember my age 8(?) teacher writing on the board "sepArate" to teach the spelling. Apparently it was a most misspelled word for that year
wouldn't want to confuse it with "suppurate" (ick).
DeleteAmong people who comment on various (non-linguistical) weblog entries I see quite often "definately". No indication whether the writer is English or American, but he/she is probably illitterate anyway.
ReplyDeleteI'd be surprised if 'restaurateur' isn't more frequently misspelt than 'restaurant', as a proportion of the number of uses anyway. Also I'm gobsmacked that the old favourite 'privilege' doesn't turn up in any of the lists of most-misspelt words.
ReplyDeleteHi! Thanks for the thoughtful post — I really enjoyed your analysis of the “most looked‑up spellings” list and the distinction you made between queries and actual misspellings. I completely agree that Google Trends data really reflects what people are curious about, not necessarily what they misspell most in everyday writing.
ReplyDeleteWhen my daughter first went to secondary school, she and her cohorts were given a list of frequently-misspelled words that they were required to learn, and told they would be tested on every year for at least the first three years of their school life. I forget what most of them were, but one, I do remember, was "weird"!
ReplyDeleteEarlier, when I myself was at school, one of our number got very confused with the word "separate" She had misspelled it in an essay, and was required to write it out 20 times. Unfortunately, she did so with the same misspelling! I wrote out the correct word on a postcard for her, emphasising the misspelled "A" - she had spelled it "seperate" - which she had had to write out a further 50 times. She was careful to remove the postcard, which she had pinned on our shared bedroom wall, before the Headmistress, who had imposed the penalty, came to supper!
I agree that determining most-misspelled word by look-ups is not likely to be correct.
ReplyDeleteI’m sure that there are more misspellings which are corrected before we see them, sometimes by the authors themselves, but also by colleagues, editors, proofreaders, and (in the old days) typists, plus now autocorrect and spelling checkers. (Sometimes, these people or processes can introduce misspellings too.)
For any instance of misspelling, it is not always known whether the author intended it that way and would change it once the correct version is pointed out or whether they actually didn’t know the correct spelling. Possibly they might even want a spelling that others consider a misspelling.
‘Separate’ is one of the few words that caught me at school. I had ‘separate.’
Besides common misspellings mentioned by other commenters, I note ‘led’ (often rendered as ‘lead’), ‘supersede’ (errors due to sound similarity with ‘intercede’, ‘succeed’, ‘seed’, etc), and ‘pomegranate’ (which I once saw with three errors: ‘pommigranite’).
Michael Vnuk
I once worked on a computer system that had codes called mnemonics. A colleague (who knew he couldn't spell) somehow decided the word was pneumonic.
DeleteMy misspelling at school was actually 'seperate'. So now I don't know if there was an autocorrect somewhere along the line, or, having had the correct spelling reinforced in my mind after my error at school, I subconsciously typed it correctly for the comment even when I was trying to type it wrongly!
DeleteMichael Vnuk
Queuing happens a lot in MMORPGs, and there's no American equivalent (you queue for a raid, you don't wait in line for it). I see a LOT of people misspell it in that context as "cue". You might consider searching on usages like "cueing for a duty", "the cue was 20 minutes", or similar, because I think it's a more common misspelling than your statistics here let on.
ReplyDelete