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.

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.

rates of -our versus -or spellings in GloWbE

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

(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:

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:

1. Definitely – 33 500 searches.
2. Separate – 30 000 searches.
3. Necessary – 29 000 searches.
4. Believe – 28 500 searches.
5. Through – 28 000 searches.
6. Gorgeous –  27 000 searches.
7. Neighbor – 25 500 searches.
8. Business – 24 200 searches.
9. Favorite – 23 000 searches.
10. Restaurant – 22 500 searches.

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Postscript (28 Feb): Another study!

 And the 2025 Separated by a Common Language US-to-UK Word of the Year is (sorta kinda):

zee (but mostly Gen Z)

I must start by assuring you: British people generally do not call the letter zee. Nevertheless, I have reasons for choosing zee this year: 

1. It is winning (particularly among[st] the people it describes) as the pronunciation of the generation name: Gen Z.
2. It is a word that comes up when people express worries that British children are "using American words", that perennial clickbait that baited a particularly large number of clicks this year. It started with The Sunday Times commissioning a survey of teachers; the results of that survey were consistently (determinedly) misinterpreted. The Sunday Times article doesn’t mention zee, but it came up often in the interviews I did after it.  If you're interested, here's an episode of Lexis podcast where we talk about the survey (and its problems).
3. It was also the Americanisms that the YouGov polling organi{s/z}tion chose for the title of its report on Americanism use in Britain in April.

source

The results of that poll are informative:

source

Essentially: the majority of Britons under 50 report using zee in the name Gen Z, with more than 70% of those under 24 (that is, in Gen Z) saying it. The majority of Britons over 50 say they say Gen-Zed. All age groups, however, say that the alphabet letter 'Z' rhymes with bed at rates above 70%. The younger age groups (versus the older) have more people claiming to say the alphabet with an ex-why-zee at the end, but more people say zed for the letter than say zee for the generation. 

That's self-reported data, and self-reports of linguistic behavio(u)rs require corroboration. We can find that corroboration. On YouGlish, you can hear both Gen-Zee and Gen-Zed in British speakers, but it's mostly Gen-Zee, particularly among younger speakers. One of the British speakers (Jessica Kellgren-Fozard) says Gen-Zee most of the time, but does say Gen-Zed at least once in one of her videos—and it wouldn't be surprising if many other speakers are inconsistent in this particular zee/zed. If you search for British people saying zee on Youglish, you'll get mentions of people named Zee and a fair amount of Mock French ("I am zee dev-ille"), but the letter-name is only used in contrast with zed. (Searching for Z in YouGlish gets you people saying zzzzzz, rather than saying the letter name, as far as I've seen.)

My daughter "Grover," has done a little poll of her 17–18-year-old friends, who all say they say Gen-Zee (she certainly does). She also notes that if she flaunts her half-Americanness and says a zee for the letter, her English friends give her a very hard time. 

But check out Generation Z: most of the speakers on YouGlish say this with zed (even younger ones). It seems that the more "formal" and semantically transparent version of the word is treated more as if the Z is the letter of the alphabet. Gen Z seems to be treated as something more opaque—a name. (Grover claims Gen Zed is "hard to say." It does sound a bit more like it might be a past-tense verb.)

The term Generation Z seems to have originated in 1993, and is not marked as American in dictionaries. Gen Z followed in 1996, and is listed as "originally N. American" in the Oxford English Dictionary. Against the evidence we've seen here, the OED lists the zed pronunciation first for BrE:

But, in keeping with the YouGlish evidence, they do not include the zee pronunciation for the full form:

Gen Z, however you pronounce them, were born between 1997 and 2012 (or thereabouts)—so the oldest Gen Zers (or Zoomers, which happens to be the 2025 Russian WotY) were 28 in 2025, and the youngest ones entered their teens. So, they've become increasingly newsworthy and we're hearing Gen Z more. Here is how often Gen Z is used in the British part of the News on the Web corpus:

Those mentions will probably continue to go up as more of the group reaches adulthood. And some of them will be reaching voting age sooner than that.

(Happy Birthday, Grover!)

Related posts:

• Zee and Zed
• Sesame Street
• Anti-Americanismism, Part 2
• Zebra
• Introducing Grover: Can you believe that she is 18?! She's gone from minor to major.

I may have promised another topic for this month's blog...but another request has (orig. AmE) come over the transom, and I'm easily distractable, so...

Mike C from Shropshire asks:

Even most BBC news reporters seem to be using “pled” as the past tense / past participle. …  Any thoughts?

Pleading and plea-ing

Let's start with a basic observation of pled versus pleaded: the use of pled is fairly particular to much more common in legal pleas. One can have pled guilty, innocent, (AmE) no contest, or (AmE) the fifth, though many sources would tell you to use pleaded instead. So we get:

• He pled guilty   = real but prescriptively frowned-upon 
• She pleaded guilty = real & prescriptively cherished
• He pleaded for their forgiveness = real & common
• ?? She pled for their forgiveness.  = unnatural-sounding much less common overall (except maybe for Scottish English speakers? See below and comments) and prescriptively frowned-upon

As you can see in the Corpus of Historical American English, it's rare to have pled for anything, but things can be pleaded for:

Because of this,  I'm going to focus my corpus searches on use of pleaded/pled guilty.

The British history of pled

Since this is Separated by a Common Language, we have to ask: is this an Americanism coming into British English? And the answer is: Wait a minute!

The Oxford English Dictionary labels pled "(chiefly Scottish and U.S.)." There's lots of evidence of pled in BrE before it could reasonably be thought of as an imported Americanism—it goes back to the 1600s. In Hansard, the parliamentary record, it's found here and there since the late 19th century:

pled guilty in Hansard

I haven't checked every example, but in the 1890s and 1990s all of the pled guilty examples are from Scottish Members of Parliament:

So, pled is a form with a long history in one part of the UK, at least. With the BBC diversifying its on-screen workforce in recent decades, there may be a rise in south-of-the-border exposure to that particular form of the verb. (I've talked about Scottish bureaucratese moving south in at least one other post.)

The American history of pled

So pled might come to the US with Scottish immigrants.  But.

In AmE pled really gets going in the late 20th century. The biggest waves of Scottish migration to the US had happened (as far as I can find out) in the late colonial period (when they would have accounted for a much larger proportion of the English-speakers in the US, and therefore might have had a greater effect on American English, than later immigrants would). It's possible that it was very common in speech in earlier times and had to become "respectable" before making it into writing much (as is thought to have happened for gotten).

On the other hand, it's very possible that pled was re-invented in the US, on analogy with lead-led and read-read [rɛd]. Certainly, the similarity between pled and these "legit" past forms paves the way for implicit acceptance of pled.

At any rate, the number of pled guilty remains a smaller number than pleaded guilty in the Corpus of Historical American English. But this corpus is mostly written English, much of it edited. I'd expect that there's more pled in speech. That's harder to get one's hands on. 

Pled guilty in speech

I had a look at the Open American Corpus (Spoken) from the early 2000s and there was just one example of pleaded and pled each. Spoken corpora just tend to be so much smaller, and so they're not great for tracking vocabulary. And, of course, there are no audio recordings of way-back-when. (Note that the Hansard Corpus above is of transcribed speech—we have to assume it's a pretty good fascimile of the speech.) 

The Open Subtitles 2018 (English) corpus (which I've accessed via Sketch Engine) contains scripted (film/movie) speech. That's not the same as natural speech, but the people writing the speech have every motivation to make it sound natural. What's interesting there is the turnaround of pled's fortunes:

• pled guilty:  356 
• pleaded guilty: 295 

I can look at these in films shot in the UK versus shot in the USA.  Because there's probably more AmE than BrE in the raw numbers above, when we compare by country, we need to 'normali{s/z}e' the numbers. So here, they're expressed as 'occurrences per million words' of the corpus:

 

	UK	USA
pleaded guilty	.02	.02
pled guilty	—	.07

While pled guilty is not found at all in the UK films, the lower numbers overall in UK films probably tells us that there are a lot more films about crime and legal proceedings in the American dataset.

Is pled in UK English a case of "Americani{s/z}ation"?

It's hard to say if BBC use of pled is Scottish voices, Scottish usage spreading or American usage borrowed. I'm going to vote for "probably all of the above". The prevalence of US courtrooms in media has led to The Law Society pointing out American things that show up in UK legal dramas: No gavels please, we're British.

At the same time, the evidence we have says that pleaded still outstrips pled in BrE by a long mile. Here's more from the up-to-yesterday News on the Web corpus, where pleaded guilty outnumbers pled guilty nearly 40-fold. 

How many of those are Scottish? Well, quite a few, but it would be a lot of work to sort out both 'is this in a Scottish news site' and 'if it's not on a Scottish news site, is it talking about something or quoting someone Scottish?'.  But I did take a sample of 100 and did a quick (more BrE) reckoning of what was what:

• 53 were from Scotland
• 30 were from either English local news or UK national news 
• 10 were clearly North American stories in national news—so probably from wire services
• 1 Northern Irish
• 1 Wales
• 5 ?

I'd take the 30 English/UK national with a grain/pinch of salt because I didn't check whether they were about Scottish legal cases. 

Is pled going up in the UK part of the news corpus: yes, but so is pleaded guilty—so it looks like there are just more legal cases in the news 

pled guilty in NOW-GB

pleaded guilty in NOW-GB

Getting back to Mike's observation: it's tough to check the BBC directly: when I tried searching their website for pled guilty, it asked me "Did you mean: plea guilty, plead guilty?" The actual results had the word pledge and not pled. Searching via Google, the first bunch of results I got were all from Scotland.  (There was only one BBC hit in my NOW sample of 100.)

I'll leave you with one more graph, from Google Books. The craziest thing in this graph is the fact that US pled guilty (orange line) has gone up so much in the past four decades whie never overtaking, or even denting, then numbers for pleaded guilty. While the use of pled guilty in UK books goes up a tiny bit in this century, it's worth noting that that's after the Criminal Procedure Act of 1995 (Scotland) and the Crime and Punishment Act of 1997 (Scotland) that include pled guilty (as well asl other laws that include pled). 

.

Last month, Dave Mandl tagged me on this message on Bluesky:

I hadn't really reali{s/z}ed it either, till Dave pointed it out. But sure enough, it is the case. Here are a couple of screenshots from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, showing the fine print and the small print with a bit more grammatical context: