Not everyone has won a Spelling Bee Competition and this is made apparent by the type of popular misspellings in each state. Keeping this in mind, ABC News has reported on which word is the most misspelled for each state. And they collected the information from Google. “Google pulled data from its search trends to reveal the top word most people have trouble spelling in each state. Using search queries that began with ‘how to spell’ and then the word in question, Google was able to determine the most troublesome words for people in all 50 states.” Take a look at the map below and read which is the top misspelled word for each state.

Observations from the Map

A picture is worth a thousand words and this map shows us some misspelled ones. The map is broken down by the number of times a certain word is repeatedly misspelled. For example, “definitely” is the most misspelled word in two separate states; therefore, those states are colored blue. Here’s the breakdown:

• The top misspelled word in one state is yellow.
• The most misspelled word in two states is blue.
• The top misspelled word in three states is purple.
• The most misspelled word in four states is red.

Yellow, Blue, Purple, and Red

There are 19 states where the misspelled word is unique to that particular state. For example, “niece” is only the top misspelled word in Texas. “Tomorrow” is the most misspelled word in Florida. Amusingly, “Hawaii” is the top misspelled word in Alaska which is the only other non-contiguous state.

There are 14 states where the top misspelled word is unique to two states. That means there are 7 words shared by two states each. For example, “appreciate” is the most misspelled word in both Illinois and Georgia. “Definitely” is the top misspelled word in both Oregon and Louisiana.

There are 9 states where the most misspelled word is unique to three states. That means 3 unique words are each shared by 3 states. For example, “gray” is the top misspelled word in Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Michigan. In another example, “pneumonia” is the most misspelled word in Washington, North Carolina, and Missouri.

Finally, there are 8 states where the most misspelled word is unique to four states. That means there are 2 words shared by 4 states each. For example, “desert” is the top misspelled word in California, Idaho, Indiana, and Connecticut. The other word, “cancelled”, is the most misspelled word in Rhode Island, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. It’s interesting that the word “cancelled” is the top misspelled word in states found only on the East Coast.

Spelling Massachusettes

Besides “Hawaii”, there’s only one additional state as the top misspelled word in a given state. This is Massachusettes. For the amusement of readers everywhere, the state where Massachusettes is the most misspelled word is this: Massachusettes. This just goes to show that difficult names of states can be hard to spell, even in their home state! It’s a good thing most email clients and word processors have built-in spelling checks.

Featured image by Pixabay on Pexels

Massachusetts image by Wikimedia on Wikipedia

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