In today’s post-dictionary era, Google autocomplete comes to the rescue in our moments of spelling despair. In honor of the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals Thursday night, Google Trends tweeted an infographic showcasing the United States’ most misspelled words by state.
The infographic shows the words most commonly searched with the phrase “How to spell” appended to it in a Google search bar. Plastered in the middle of each state is the correctly spelled word most searched in that state. Too bad, because it could be hilarious to see the most common attempted spelling. The color of each state indicates how many other states in the country share the struggle of spelling the specified word.
It’s the #spellingbee finals! These are the top “how to spell” searches for words by state, mapped #dataviz pic.twitter.com/rjXllJfOoE
— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) May 26, 2016
“Cancelled” and “desert” are the most commonly checked upon words, which makes sense. Is it two Ls or one? Is that the difference between British and American spelling? And as for the latter, are folks actually trying to spell “desert,” or are they going for “dessert” and Google autocomplete just picks the first one for the sake of alphabetization? Either way, it’s not too surprising to see. But as for Hawaii, I had to Google what a boutineer even is.
Also, come on Massachusetts.
Watch Thursday night as 10 students from around the country take the stage for a spell-off in the annual competition.
Rd 7 ends w/10 #SpellingBee finalists! Watch LIVE on @espn @ 8PM! Spellers 13,16,20,30,38,74,114,152,229,232 move on pic.twitter.com/sl4rbhugSK
— Scripps National Spelling Bee (@ScrippsBee) May 26, 2016
While they probably don’t have any trouble spelling the words in the graphic, it’s interesting to see how many of their fellow statesmen do.
