More reserch is required
“Is “becuase”, with its 4,950,000 hits on a famous web search engine, the commonest typo in the English language?
…When Alex Llewelyn searched for “accomodate” on the FWSE he got 6,610,000 hits; “sence” scored 8,040,000 and “definately” logged an incredible 17,400,000. John Lavery’s “seperate” also checked in at about 17,000,000, so these all beat “becuase”.
But what about misspellings of the really common words in the English language? Here the picture becomes more complicated. Using “teh” scores 27,100,000, but as several readers have pointed out, this has become a legitimate way of spelling the word among the web fraternity. It even has its own Wikipedia entry.
Rusty Nash and William Cowley note that with “of” and “and” things are more complicated still. A search for “fo” scores 78,000,000 and “nad” scores 153,000,000, but both these words are acronyms as well as misspellings, so we don’t know what the true figure for typos is…
Barry Rein notes another flaw in the typo scores: a common word that is only rarely mistyped might get more hits on the FWSE than a less common word that is often mistyped. So to find out which words are most frequently misspelled whenever they are used we would need to give the figure as a ratio of the number of hits of the mistyped word to the total number of hits of the word correctly spelled.
More research is required, it seems.”
Great article, but my favourite new word is the one they snuck in there- the FWSE.
Extracts above copied from the New Scientist article viewable here. If only more linguistics was interesting enough to make it into New Scientist…
Guilty aside- I am sure I am responsible for at least 2 of the “separate” hits. For some reason the spelling part of my brain cuts out when I don’t have the adrenaline of the classroom experience… I insist that “snuck” is a real word though, despite not being on WordPress spellchecker.
PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPS- It’s an old article I’m afraid, but wanted to finally post it so I could clear it off the Favourites part of my FWB (famous web browser).
