Happens to the best of us: Most-misspelled words

June 6, 2023

By Kim Komando

When I think “embarrassing searches,” it’s not … that. It’s the ones when I’m trying to figure out how to spell a word I definitely should know how to spell. I’m not alone. We all use search engines as a dictionary these days.

But which words are the most difficult to spell? The folks over at unscrambled words (a Scrabble helper site) looked at a year of Google Search data to spill the beans.

Do you struggle with any of these?

Here are the top 10 misspelled words through Google Search with the number of times the words were looked up.

1. Restaurant – 95,000
2. Pneumonia – 13,000
3. Appreciate – 11,000
4. Receipt – 9,700
5. Beautiful – 9,400
6. Niece – 9,200
7. Maintenance – 8,500
8. Bougie – 8,300
9. Diarrhea – 8,200
10. Congratulations – 7,100

Words I’m surprised didn’t make the top 10:

• Calendar (I commonly see this written as calender)
• Conscience (that S and C every time)
• Sergeant (not sargent)
• Embarrass (all those double letters are tricky!)
• Guarantee (this one is easy to mess up)
• Accommodation (the Cs and Ms get you)

😳 Speaking of misspellings … Google was initially intended to be spelled “Googol,” a mathematical term for 10 raised to the power of 100.

The person filling out the domain registration paperwork misspelled the name. But the founders decided to stick with the mistake. I mean, it wasn’t like a typo on a tombstone. That’s a grave mistake.

🐝 If you have a Scrabble or Wordle fan in your life, be sure to pass along this fun little story with them.