simont | Google misspelling challenges for the bored

Google misspelling challenges for the bored

Out of curiosity I ran two Google searches this morning, whose results were surprisingly close:

Results 1 – 10 of about 801,000 for "free reign"
Results 1 – 10 of about 841,000 for "free rein"

The right one won, but only just. This gave me an idea for a couple of silly Google challenges, if anyone reading this is bored enough:

Firstly, see if you can find a well known word or phrase, together with a common misspelling, in which the wrong spelling actually gets more hits on Google. (Cross-channel variation, or other reasonably justifiable differences of opinion, don't count as misspellings. One of them has to be clearly wrong, such that anyone sufficiently educated who isn't an incurable descriptive linguist has to agree on which one it is.)

Secondly, see if you can find a wrong-and-right pair in which the scores are (proportionately) closer together than the above two.

I haven't tried either, but I'd guess the second challenge would be harder than the first: I'm sure there must be some wrong spelling more popular than the right one, but those two are really pretty close by the normal Google standards (there's usually more like an order of magnitude difference).

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Have you checked the "misspellings"?
The first two sites mentioning "free reign" are sites about language, the next few are for a game about controlling a city (so reign would be okay). I wouldn't be surprised if more of the sites are about common mistakes in language...

However,

I'd guess a lot of sites about language mistakes will mention the correct spelling as well and hence will show up in both lists; they may not be at the top of both lists, but they'll probably contribute about equally to the overall hit counts
I'd guess (off the top of my head) that out of 800,000 hits, there will be at most about 1000 or so talking self-consciously about the existence of common misspellings, and the rest will be real instances, so it only becomes significant in a case where the wrong spelling beats the right one by an extremely small margin
in any case, it's only a silly game; going by raw Google hit count is a reasonably unambiguous means of telling whether you've won it or not, whereas trawling the resulting 800,000 hits to see how many were real misspellings would be completely infeasible and spoil the fun even if not :-)

It's a game that comes up pretty frequently on alt.usage.english, so I know it well!

I'm sure there were some such described in language log archives, someone even less productive on Monday than me might be able to search them up...

Coming up with closer-together pairs is challenging challenge...

I was just going to suggest LanguageLog too. I think I heard about it from you initially, so it's rather nice to be able to second the referral here. :-)

OTOH, my looking them up may be cheating. Um.... I could maybe think of some misspellings that became accepted? :)

here... (http://www.google.com/search?q=misspelling%20challenges%20for%20the%20bored)

"stationary closet" has slightly more hits than "stationery closet"; neither has very many. Though with "cupboard" the reverse is true.

looking at how many of the top umpteen hits for "stationary" are actually about stationery is interesting.

Reminds me of my Physics GCSE, which talked about a car that was stationery... or something like that.

The world is ending if even standardised exams get this stuff wrong.

I should hope that very few closets weren't stationary.

I can't remember whether it's apocryphal or whether it actually happened at my company, but the classic one of these is the internal office email with the subject line "The stationary cupboard has moved" :-)

"Do you sell Stationery?"

"No, sometimes I move about a bit".

Boom Boom.

There's a stationery factory just outside Sawston which we drive by sometimes, and I like to imagine a misspelling on the sign leading to it driving off in disgust. It's by the railway, so I imagine it would become long and thin and trainlike.

Thankfully there are more hits for "Courts Martial" than "Court Martials" which is the example I initially thought of. And google has learned to spell Cthulhu since I last looked.

Hm. Yes. I am of course in favour of using the traditional/correct/pedantic version of phrases, and pleased, and have always been taught to say "courts martial"[1][2], yet the alternative makes a lot of sense, as compared to many spelling changes apparently merely for the sake of it:

* If it's a noun referring to the court, then yes, "martial" is an adjective modifying "court", so the traditional reasoning holds.
* Yet, if it refers to the process, that isn't the case -- you don't say "his court" to refer to his non-military trial, so in "his court martial" "court martial" is a unit, not a noun and modifier, I think.
* For instance, I don't think anyone ever says "He was courted martial" rather than "he was court martialed". Or maybe we should.
* If it's a compound noun, or a compound word, there's a long traditional of just sticking an "s" on the end.

[1] Aren't there courts marital, too, come to think of it?
[2] See the whole "veils glaucous" essay, I wrote a whole mythology on the basis of noun-initial phrases :)

"courted martially", perhaps?

Of course, that just sounds like being chatted up by a squaddie.

How would you search for the common error in recording an individual's reluctance: 'X is loath to do Y', which has replaced the correct English 'X is loth to do Y'

The latter is rejected by spellcheckers but it is, nevertheless, the correct spelling of this old English adjective.

You can use wildcard * in Google searches:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22*+is+loath+to+*%22&btnG=Google+Search
- 123,000 hits

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22*+am+loath+to+*%22&btnG=Search
- 84,300 hits

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22*+are+loath+to+*%22&btnG=Search
- 308,000 hits

or more generally just "loath to":
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22loath+to%22&btnG=Search
- 1,180,000 hits

But I thought the more common error was "loathe to" (a truly grammatical error) instead of "loth/loath to", which are surely just alternative spellings:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22loathe+to%22&btnG=Search
- 810,000 hits

Why do you believe "loath to" is incorrect? The OED lists them as equally acceptable variants, and gives examples of writers using both spellings back to the 16th century; beyond that there's an even wider variety of spellings of the word. Indeed, if you want to go on common patterns of OE -> ModE orthographic development, "oa" is probably the best-supported spelling: "loath" comes from OE "la:th" (with long back "a"), like "oath" from "a:th", "goat" from "ga:t", "boat" from "ba:t", "oak" from "a:c", "soap" from "sa:p(e)"...

"Here here" gets about 70% more hits than "hear hear", but both seem to have a lot of irrelevant hits from a glance at the results. (Subtracting "and here" and "here here here" doesn't make much difference.)

The other ones I thought of (millenium, supercede, propogate, lead as pptc. of "to lead") have more hits for the standard variants, though sometimes the difference is not huge.

'Hear Hear' was the one that occurred to me, too.

"off my own bat" - Results 1 - 10 of about 570
"off my own back" - Results 1 - 10 of about 901

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Subject: Re: Ping Donna: discovered while checking something in another newsgroup
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R H Draney <dadoctah@spamcop.net> wrote:

> Impressively close Googlecount rachoux here:
>
> "weiner dog" 148,000
> "wiener dog" 176,000

Interesting. Since "wiener" is historically correct (compare "Vienna") I
would write it in the other order:

"wiener dog" 176,000
"weiner dog" 148,000 Ratio of 1.19 .

In my records of Google finds, that puts this right in with spelling
variants that have been accepted by dictionaries in the last century (or
so): miniscule, "flout/flaunt authority," and "quite a trouper/trooper."

Yes, and MW behaves consistently -- it has an entry for "weiner" saying:

Main Entry: weiner
variant of WIENER

So, I tentatively conclude that a ratio close to l:1 is correlated with
lexicographical acceptance.

--
Best -- Donna Richoux

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Google misspelling challenges for the bored

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Google misspelling challenges for the bored

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An AUE post