The words we keep having to Google

My husband shared a trick he learned in college to spell parallel correctly.

“Think of the word as a sandwich,” he began, but he forgot whether it was supposed to be a sandwich made with thick slices of bread (parrallel?) or thin slices (paralel?). The sandwich is actually regular bread with lots of filling: parallel (one r and one l at each end, and ll as the “meat” in the middle).

As mnemonics go, it’s pretty unhelpful. Rather than struggle with sandwiches, remember that parallel has two parallel lines. Or just memorize it.

Double letters often make things tough. Without spell check, I have no chance of getting accommodate right. I am not alone. Several entertaining studies recently found what words Americans have the most difficulty spelling.

According to unscrambled-words.com, which provides Scrabble help, the word that prompts the most spelling-
related Google searches, by a huge margin, is restaurant. People wonder how to spell it seven times more than the next most looked-up words, pneumonia and appreciate (95,000 a month versus 13,000 and 11,000). 

This has to do with how much people look at reviews and order food online – they want to find a place to eat or are texting friends where to meet, and then realize they’re not sure how to spell restaurant.

As with pneumonia, it also reflects the fact that English pronunciation often doesn’t match the spelling – restront and resteraunt are common errors.

The grammar help site Quillbot chose 150 “hard to spell” words and found how often Google users typed them incorrectly. By this metric, calendar is trickiest – 275,000 searches a month presume it’s calender. Arctic is next, often spelled artic. Ironically, that was originally more common. It was spelled and pronounced without the first c. In the 17th century, grammarians decided that the English word should reflect its Greek root: arktos (“bear,” the constellation Ursa Major). 

The next most common errors show that not everyone memorized “i before e except after c” in school – neice (instead of niece) and recieve (for receive).

Google trends publishes data on what words people are looking for when they ask, “How do you spell ... ?” organized by state. Some of these are understandable: In 2022, Louisiana and Vermont wondered about gray, presumably because in British English it’s spelled grey. Minnesotans puzzled over paparazzi (lots of candidates for double letters there). In New Mexico, it was bologna, the Italian city and lunch meat, perhaps in contrast to baloney, the nonsense. But Alaska’s word makes no sense to me, maybe because I’m from Wisconsin. Alaskans asked Google how to spell cheese.