It's rediculous

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Fri Dec 12, 2008 3:54 am

How horrible does the spelling "rediculous" look to you?

I keep seeing it so I looked it up and the hits are only fractionally lower than for the "correct spelling". 41 vs 38 million.

Time to mark it correct?

ouyang · Post by **ouyang** » Fri Dec 12, 2008 1:57 pm

Time to mark it correct?

Don't be ridiculous! http://how-to-spell-ridiculous.com/[/quote]

jotham · Post by **jotham** » Sun Dec 14, 2008 3:34 am

woodcutter wrote:How horrible does the spelling "rediculous" look to you?

I keep seeing it so I looked it up and the hits are only fractionally lower than for the "correct spelling". 41 vs 38 million.

Time to mark it correct?

It looks really ridiculous to me, and I can't say I've ever seen it before. Maybe I just visit forums that are frequented by the more literate.

Upon first seeing it, I thought it was just a foreigner; but then when I saw your post name, my curiosity was picqued to read it.

Stephen Jones · Post by **Stephen Jones** » Sun Dec 14, 2008 1:59 pm

When you Google a word that doesn't exist Google still gives you the hits for its nearest equivalent.

The Corpus of Contemporay American English has two hits for 'rediciulious', one from 1773, compared to 2,500 + for ridiculous.

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Sun Dec 14, 2008 11:43 pm

Thanks for that Stephen - for some reason it works like this. For the correct spelling you get about 41 million, for "rediculous" 38 million and for any other misspelling, it would seem, radiculous, ribiculous etc you get 36 million.

Could someone explain that? What impact does that have on the accuracy of google corpus linguistics in general?

To take another example that reasonably well-educated people often seem to get wrong, "weird" has 151 million, "wierd" 128 and random misspellings get 117 million hits.

The site is interesting Ouyang - I think that kind of cultural event, if you like, is very important in deciding whether a misspelling that is a better guess than the real spelling (as I think "rediculous" probably is) manages to become accepted. For example if George Bush uses a final address to the nation to say that things have gone well in his years in office aside from the increase in the misspelling of either of these words then the misspellings will have no hope of gaining ground in the near term. Well, I suppose spelling is well regulated anyway, but such cultural things must have a big influence on other kinds of possible "mistakes".

(I don't get why people write "wierd" by the way - OK i before e except after c but doesn't it sort of suggest the wrong sound?)

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 6:24 am

How about these?

Misspelled 5.4 million hits
Mispelled 5.6 million! Now how about this one!?
Mispelt about 69 000
Misspelt about 960 000
Mispeled 5.1 million
Misspeled 5.1 million
Mispolled 10 hits

??????????

Also Mispell has more hits than Misspell, while Misspelling remains more popular than Mispelling. Does this reflect a rather ironic reality, or not?

I've been through a few of these 100 top blunders but I can't find another where the "mistake" defeats the dictionary entry.

http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/misspelled.html

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It's rediculous

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