What Are the Most Commonly Misspelled Words?

The most commonly misspelled word in English is “publicly” – frequently written as publically – according to Oxford Dictionaries’ analysis of the Oxford English Corpus, an electronic collection of over 2 billion words of real English. Survey data shows how widespread the problem is: 65% of UK adults failed to spell “necessary” in 2012, and 62% of Americans misspelled “embarrassed” in 2009. Here are the key numbers, the full list, and what the hardest words have in common – with every claim linked to its primary source.

The Master List of Commonly Misspelled Words

Most “misspelled words” lists online are editorial guesses. This one isn’t: Oxford Dictionaries published a table of the most common English misspellings measured against the Oxford English Corpus – over 2 billion words of real-world English (2009). Every word below comes from that corpus-verified list.

Merriam-Webster’s “Commonly Misspelled Words” collection adds several US favorites to the same pile: rhythm (no everyday vowels), maneuver (from French manœuvre), consensus (like “sense,” not “census”), broccoli (double c, single l), and – fittingly – misspell itself, which needs two s’s.

The strongest evidence that these words are genuinely hard: “definitely,” “separate,” “necessary,” and “embarrassed” each show up independently in the Oxford corpus data (2009), the Mencap spelling test (2012), the Ipsos MORI survey (2009), and Google’s search-based state maps (2017–2018). Four different methods, same words. Note that this list is about spelling, not capitalization – if your question is which words get capital letters in a headline, that’s a different list entirely.

What Is the Most Misspelled Word in Every US State?

Google Trends released state-by-state maps of America’s top “how to spell” searches twice – ahead of the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 2017 and again in 2018. Both years, one word dominated: “beautiful.”

One correction worth making: the viral “2021 map” was not a Google release. It was an analysis by AT&T Experts, an AT&T retailer, applied to a year of Google Trends data during the pandemic – then widely re-reported as Google’s own. The same goes for the “2025 Google map” that circulated in spring 2025: Language Log traced it to a word-game website, and documented serious problems with its methodology.

The maps produce reliably strange trivia. In Google’s 2017 data, Wisconsin’s most-searched spelling was “Wisconsin,” New Jersey’s was “twelve,” and Pennsylvania’s was “sauerkraut” – and Google’s own announcement tweet misspelled Maryland’s word “ninety” as “Nintey.” In 2018, Maine’s top spelling search was “Connecticut.”

Caveat: these maps measure “how to spell” searches – words people know they can’t spell – not how often words are actually misspelled in writing. That’s why they skew toward long showpieces like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” rather than everyday traps like “separate.”

How Many People Misspell Everyday Words?

More than most of us would guess – and far more than we admit. In Mencap’s 2012 survey of 2,000 UK adults, 76% rated their own spelling as very or fairly good, yet only 21% could spell all five test words. Students scored worst of any group, at 13%. Mencap’s chief executive Mark Goldring described the results as “over two thirds of Britons now having to rely on spell check.”

The American picture is no better. In the Spelling Society’s 2009 Ipsos MORI survey of 1,000 US adults, more than half performed poorly on ten everyday words, and 1 in 3 said they rely on spellcheckers for job applications and letters. Men did worse than women on nearly every word – “liaison” was the lone exception.

Academic research puts hard numbers on the baseline: spelling errors run 1–3% of words in typewritten text (Kukich, ACM Computing Surveys, 1992). The largest compiled error collection, the Birkbeck spelling error corpus (Mitton, 1985), holds 36,133 recorded misspellings of just 6,136 words – nearly six documented ways to get each word wrong.

Why Do Words Get Misspelled?

The master list isn’t random – almost every word on it falls into one of five failure patterns, and each pattern has data behind it.

• Double letters. Accommodate, embarrass, occurrence, committee, millennium – Merriam-Webster notes that “accommodate” simply has more double letters than we expect. The inverse trap: harass and tomorrow, where writers double letters that stay single.
• Silent letters. Pneumonia – which topped three states in Google’s 2017 map – hides its p; which loses its h to become “wich” (the top spelling search in 5 states, per the 2021 AT&T Experts analysis).
• The ei/ie trap. Believe and receive follow “i before e except after c” – then weird breaks the rule entirely.
• Unstressed vowels. Definitely becomes “definately” and separate becomes “seperate” because the schwa sound, as Merriam-Webster’s Spelling Bee analysis puts it, “can be represented by any vowel letter.”
• Foreign borrowings. In Merriam-Webster’s analysis of ten years of Scripps National Spelling Bee finals (published 2021), 48% of misspelled words came from Greek and Latin, and French led modern languages at 19%. That’s liaison, maneuver, restaurant, and broccoli in a nutshell.

Structurally, the mistakes are tiny. Fred Damerau’s 1964 study – the paper behind the Damerau–Levenshtein distance used in every spellchecker since – found that 80% of misspellings are a single wrong letter: one insertion, deletion, substitution, or transposition. When you misspell a word, you’re usually one keystroke from correct.

What Do Spelling Mistakes Cost?

The most cited number in this genre comes from UK entrepreneur Charles Duncombe, who told the BBC in 2011 that a single spelling mistake can cut online sales in half – after fixing one error on his tightsplease.co.uk site, revenue per visitor doubled. Treat it honestly for what it is: one businessman’s internal figures, not a peer-reviewed study. But the mechanism is plausible – Oxford Internet Institute professor William Dutton told the BBC in the same piece that a misspelled word can be “a killer issue” on sites where users already fear spam and phishing.

The court-verified case is stranger than the anecdote. In 2009, UK Companies House recorded the 124-year-old Welsh engineering firm Taylor & Sons as wound up – the company actually in liquidation was Taylor & Son, no s. The record was corrected three days later, but the damage cascaded: the firm collapsed, taking roughly 250 jobs with it. In January 2015, the High Court held Companies House liable, and the government paid £8.8m for a single added letter.

The pattern behind both stories: surface errors read as credibility signals. That applies beyond spelling – inconsistent capitalization in headlines sends the same message, which is why editors are just as strict about sentence case versus title case as they are about spelling.

Which Words Do Students Misspell at Each Grade Level?

England is the only country in this article’s dataset with a statutory answer. The UK National Curriculum’s English Appendix 1: Spelling (2013) sets two lists of 100 words each – one for Years 3–4 (roughly US grades 2–3), one for Years 5–6 (grades 4–5) – explicitly described as “a mixture of words pupils frequently use in their writing and those which they often misspell.”

The overlap is the story: the words 9-year-olds drill are the same words adults still get wrong decades later. The US has no federal equivalent – “3rd grade spelling words” lists online trace back to curriculum vendors, not government sources. The strongest US research is Graham, Harris & Loynachan’s Basic Spelling Vocabulary List (Journal of Educational Research, 1993), which found that just 850 words, graded across grades 1–5, account for 80% of the words children use in their writing – master those and most spelling problems in practice disappear.

Sources

1. The most common English misspellings (Oxford English Corpus analysis) — Oxford Dictionaries / Lexico (archived), 2009
2. Commonly Misspelled Words — Merriam-Webster, n.d.
3. Misspelled Words of the National Spelling Bee — Merriam-Webster, with Scripps and Babbel, 2021
4. Google reveals America's most misspelled words (Google Trends state map) — CBS News, 2017
5. What are the most misspelled words in every state? — NBC News, 2017
6. Google releases each state's most commonly misspelled word — U.S. News & World Report, 2018
7. Each State's Most Commonly Googled Misspelled Word — AT&T Experts (Google Trends analysis), 2021
8. Mencap survey highlights Britain's poor spelling — Mencap, 2012
9. US spelling survey (Ipsos MORI, 1,000 US adults) — The Spelling Society, 2009
10. Spelling mistakes 'cost millions' in lost online sales — BBC News, 2011
11. Government compensates wound-up business £8.8m after Companies House spelling error — IBTimes UK, 2015
12. National Curriculum in England, English Appendix 1: Spelling — UK Department for Education, 2013
13. The Basic Spelling Vocabulary List (Graham, Harris & Loynachan) — Journal of Educational Research, 1993
14. A Technique for Computer Detection and Correction of Spelling Errors (Damerau) — Communications of the ACM, 1964
15. Techniques for Automatically Correcting Words in Text (Kukich) — ACM Computing Surveys, 1992
16. Birkbeck spelling error corpus (Mitton) — Oxford Text Archive, 1985
17. America's Most Misspelled Words (methodology criticism of search-based maps) — Language Log, 2025

Frequently Asked Questions