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
Where there are US/UK variants, it's often the case that the corpus has included American writing and tagged it as GB because it's on a British website (or vice versa). For that reason, I've (
in another post) used
-or/our spellings as a diagnostic for how reliable the country tagging is in GloWbE. So, it's not necessarily the case that BrE writers are mispelling them.
-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, 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
Jewellery is not marked with "
jewelry is also correct" in WU.pro's list, but
jewelry is the correct spelling in AmE. The AmE/BrE spelling difference is surely adding to the confusion about how to spell it, but the word is just difficult in its own right, with that double L and three-syllable pronunciation (=
jewelry). Here's a shortened list of spellings in GloWbE (there are lots more
one-off spellings), where the older, now-AmE spelling
jewelry appears more than 1/3 of the time on the UK sites, but some definite misspellings make their way in too.
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
Most people don't seem to have a problem with spelling country, but those who misspell it are not more likely to be British:
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.
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Postscript (28 Feb): Another study!
Another company's marketing ploy, but a much better analysis of misspelling (though only for children):
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:
- Sketch
- Mischievous
- February
- Couldn't
- Mustn't
- License
- Definitely
- Indefinite
- Convenience
- Preferred
