Source: Word Tips
Did you know that 20% of the world's population speaks English? That's approximately 1.35 billion people. But despite being one of the most popular languages spoken and studied, it doesn't stop us from getting it wrong when it comes to putting fingers on keyboards.
We analyzed the words used in 2 billion Tweets to uncover the most commonly misspelled words in every country. Turns out there are some words that are just tricky for everyone. None more so than "coolly", which is a tough spell for 47 countries.
Misspelled words around the world:
There are more than 171,000 words in the English language, so it’s only natural that we might misspell a few of them every once in a while.
Turns out that Cyprus residents struggle to spell 'minuscule'.
But can you imagine a world without misspellings? A place where the individual could spell English words the way they thought best? Soundz gud, rite?
‘N’ ‘O’ spells NO.
There would be no Scrabble. No crosswords. No anagrams. No looking down on someone for writing “successfull” (successful) in their résumé. What sort of a world is that??
We used to have such a dystopia: it wasn’t until the Gutenberg Press started churning out books in the 15th century that English spelling became widely standardized. Ironically, it may take the internet – the ‘sequel’ to the Gutenberg Press – to get us back there.
On the internet, misspelling is rife. Much of it is actually a good thing. Some misspell to avoid detection and/or censorship. Others do it to save precious keystrokes and characters. These misspellings have evolved into their own unofficial standard and now look ‘misspelled’ if gotten wrong. Meanwhile, “people are representing their spoken dialects more through spelling in spaces like Twitter and Instagram,” says Lauren Squires, an Ohio State University linguist.
And then there is Twitter, where scribes scribe with hurried abandon and regular tweeters assume their own errors will go unnoticed. They don’t. In fact, WordTips decided to be that guy by counting the common spelling mistakes on Twitter around the world to see who spells which words wrong the most.
WordTips started with a list of the 350 most misspelled words in the English language, noting down the correct spellings and the most common misspellings.
After gathering a sample of over two billion geotagged tweets from around the world, the team isolated the word in each country that had the highest % of misspellings (i.e., the most misspelled word).
They repeated this process for every state in the United States. U.S. English and British English variations in spelling were both considered viable and not misspellings in the States Map. This data was gathered in July 2022.
● “Coolly” is the most-misspelled word in 47 countries, more than any other word.
● “Foreign” and “promise” are each misspelled at a higher than average rate in three U.S.
states, more than any other word.
● Majority English-speaking countries, the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia, each has coolly
and miniscule as their most-misspelled words.
Check out which words are misspelled the most in your country with this interactive chart:
This study was done by WordTips and can be found at the following link: https://word.tips/most-misspelled-words-map/
