What is the most misspelled word in the English language?

It is an interesting question, and one that is harder to answer than it might appear at first glance. We should be able to use the all-knowing Internet to search for instances of misspellings, and compare the number of instances of the correct spelling. But it is not always easy to isolate the misspelling.

Dr. Boli has often suggested that the most misspelled word in the English language is led, the simple past and past participle of the verb “to lead.” It is very often spelled “lead,” by confusion with the identically pronounced metal, and by analogy with “read,” another strong verb whose change in pronunciation from present to past is exactly the same as the change from “lead” to “led.”

But how do we isolate the misspelling “lead” for the past tense from the perfectly correct spelling of the present tense? Dr. Boli has hit on one method: he searched on the phrase “has lead to,” in which “lead” is very unlikely to be meant for the present tense or (for that matter) the metal. We can probably assume that the ratio of misspelling to correct spelling in this unambiguous phrase will be just about the same as the ratio in other uses of the word. These are the results from Google:

“has lead to”: About 45,500,000 results

“has led to”: About 491,000,000 results

Can we find any other word where the ratio of misspelling to correct spelling is higher?

Here is one very unscientific “study” that picks “separate” (often spelled “seperate”) as the most misspelled word. But here are the results from Google:

“seperate”: About 37,000,000 results

“separate”: About 465,000,000 results

Close, but not as often misspelled as “led.”

How about “definitely”?

“definately”: About 34,600,000 results

“definitely”: About 432,000,000 results

So far, “definitely” is running behind. But if we add some other common misspellings of the word, it begins to pick up speed:

“definatly”: About 4,680,000 results

“definitly”: About 4,440,000 results

Adding up those three common misspellings, we come up with 43,720,000 misspelled instances against 432,000,000 correctly spelled instances—a ratio of almost exactly 1 to 10. “Definitely” wins by a nose—which is especially impressive considering that misspellings of “definitely” will trip a spelling-checker, whereas the common misspelling of “led” will not.

Provisionally, then, we may regard “definitely” as the most misspelled word in the English language. But we simply cannot leave it at that. Dr. Boli calls on all the pedants out there (and surely there must be a few pedants in Dr. Boli’s audience) to contribute to this important research project. By combining the power of our brains and our endless hours of idle leisure, we can establish once and for all which word in English is the most misspelled. Then we can take corrective action.

(A helpful searching hint: if you use Google to search for misspelled words, remember to put them in quotation marks.)

There were three book titles made up by Dr. Boli in yesterday’s literary puzzle:

The Unicycle Boys’ Great Mustard-Gas Adventure

The All Right Boys at the World’s Fair

The Railroad Boys in the Outback

All the rest are real books that were published by real publishers, and every one of them can now be found at Project Gutenberg. If you know a boy with an ebook reader, you know now what to tell him.

The Motor Boys Overland
The Brighton Boys in the Trenches
Motor Boat Boys’ River Chase
The Go Ahead Boys and the Mysterious Old House
The Iron Boys on the Ore Boats
The Ranger Boys Outwit the Timber Thieves
The Radio Boys on Secret Service Duty
The Bungalow Boys Along the Yukon
The River Motor Boat Boys on the St. Lawrence
The Auto Boys’ Quest
The Boy Aviators’ Flight for a Fortune

Although these are all real titles, as you can verify by following the links yourself, Dr. Boli might as well confess that he wishes he had made up The River Motor Boat Boys on the St. Lawrence and The Iron Boys on the Ore Boats.

Here is a little literary puzzle for our devoted readers. A century ago, the book trade was inundated with what today’s marketers would call “high-concept” boys’ adventure books. Without resorting to a search engine, can you tell which of the titles in the list that follows were actually published and which ones were made up by Dr. Boli this morning? (A big hint: Dr. Boli made up three of them.) The answer will appear in this space tomorrow.

The Motor Boys Overland
The Brighton Boys in the Trenches
Motor Boat Boys’ River Chase
The Go Ahead Boys and the Mysterious Old House
The Iron Boys on the Ore Boats
The Ranger Boys Outwit the Timber Thieves
The Unicycle Boys’ Great Mustard-Gas Adventure
The Radio Boys on Secret Service Duty
The Bungalow Boys Along the Yukon
The All Right Boys at the World’s Fair
The River Motor Boat Boys on the St. Lawrence
The Auto Boys’ Quest
The Railroad Boys in the Outback
The Boy Aviators’ Flight for a Fortune

Dear Dr. Boli: I have to write a poem for our high-school graduation, but the trouble is—and don’t let anyone know I told you this—I’m not very good at poems. What would you suggest I do? —Sincerely, Meredith, Age 18, Blandville Area High School.

Dear Madam: Write a sonnet, or some other relatively short form of poem in which both the meter and the rhyme are strictly controlled. And be very strict with yourself about meter and rhyme. Do not say to yourself, “Well, nine syllables are good enough for that line,” or “I suppose ‘mine’ and ‘time’ are close enough to a rhyme that I can get away with it.” Allow no deviations from the established formula.

Dr. Boli realizes that writing a proper sonnet takes some work—he usually allows himself at least fifteen minutes for the task—but he assures you that the work, which after all is a simple mechanical exercise that anyone can do, will be well worth the time. Your teachers, your peers, and all their parents are completely convinced that writing a formal poem is an impossible feat. They will be astonished by your literary virtuosity. And here is the really important thing: they will be paying attention to the structure of your poem so much that they will ignore the meaning.

That is vitally important. If you write a mechanically perfect sonnet, you always have the excuse that you had to let the meter and the rhyme push your thoughts in this or that direction. No one in the audience you’re facing will complain if your thoughts are a bit on the insipid side. But if you take what you probably think is the easy way out and write something in free verse, you have no excuse. You had those thoughts, and you wrote them down. Nothing prevented you from having different thoughts. If you write a vapidly platitudinous poem, everyone will know that you have a vapidly platitudinous mind. Your brain will be standing in front of that audience naked.

If you are Walt Whitman, you can get away with free verse, because you have brilliant thoughts leaking out of your brain all the time, not to mention a superb natural sense of rhythm. But you say that you are not very good at poems. Structure is therefore your most important ally, and the more perfectly you stick to your chosen structure, the less it matters how dull a person you really are.