Google reveals America’s most misspelled words by state
- June 1, 2017 |Last updated on 05/01/2023
As students gather to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, we wanted to look back to 2017 when Google Trends decided to get in on the word games, too.
The analysts took an unscientific look at the most commonly misspelled words across America. Researchers compiled Google searches of “how to spell _____” from each state. After compiling the data from Jan. 1 through April 30 of that year, the results showed each state’s most misspelled word.
ICYMI – here's our map of the most misspelled words in America #spellingbee
(corrected legend) pic.twitter.com/2w56NpDgGK
— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) May 30, 2017
Longer Words Aren’t Necessarily Harder To Spell
Google also broke down the results by word length. Words ranged from one to five letters all the way up to 20+ letters. Surprisingly, the mid-range words caused the most problems, here’s a look at the breakdown:
- Five letters or less: 7 states
- Six to 10 letters: 38 states
- 11 to 19 letters: 3 states
- 20 or more letters: 2 states
The longest word in the bunch — supercalifragilisticexpialidocious — has 34 letters and stumped both Connecticut and West Virginia. Chances are these searches happened after a “Mary Poppins” viewing.
Mississippi had the most trouble spelling the word nanny.
Some of the other shorter words causing confusion include:
- Angel in South Carolina
- Chaos in Tennessee
- Gray in Georgia
- Liar in Rhode Island
- Quote in Idaho
- Sense in Oregon
Most Commonly Misspelled Words
Some states shared problems with the same tricky word.
For instance, beautiful proved to be an ugly word (to spell, at least) for California, Kentucky, Minnesota, New York and Ohio.
Meanwhile Alabama, Maine, Michigan and Washington couldn’t find the spelling cure for pneumonia.
Excuse Me, You Can’t Spell What?
Perhaps the most head-scratching spelling search comes from Wisconsin. It looks like residents of the state had a bit of trouble spelling the name of their home state. Yes, it’s true. Wisconsin was the most-searched spelling word for the state.
So what is the most searched spelling word in your state? Find it on the full spelling search list, shown in alphabetical order below.
- Alabama: pneumonia
- Alaska: schedule
- Arizona: tomorrow
- Arkansas: chihuahua
- California: beautiful
- Colorado: tomorrow
- Connecticut: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
- Delaware: hallelujah
- Washington, D.C.: ninety
- Florida: receipt
- Georgia: gray
- Hawaii: people
- Idaho: quote
- Illinois: appreciate
- Indiana: hallelujah
- Iowa: vacuum
- Kansas: diamond
- Kentucky: beautiful
- Louisiana: giraffe
- Maine: pneumonia
- Maryland: special
- Massachusetts: license
- Michigan: pneumonia
- Minnesota: beautiful
- Mississippi: nanny
- Missouri: maintenance
- Montana: surprise
- Nebraska: suspicious
- Nevada: available
- New Hampshire: diarrhea
- New Jersey: twelve
- New Mexico: bananas
- New York: beautiful
- North Carolina: angel
- North Dakota: dilemma
- Ohio: beautiful
- Oklahoma: patient
- Oregon: sense
- Pennsylvania: sauerkraut
- Rhode Island: liar
- South Carolina: chihuahua
- South Dakota: college
- Tennessee: chaos
- Texas: maintenance
- Utah: disease
- Vermont: Europe
- Virginia: delicious
- Washington: pneumonia
- West Virginia: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
- Wisconsin: Wisconsin
- Wyoming: priority
Disclaimer: The Scripps National Spelling Bee is an event put on by The E.W. Scripps Company, Simplemost Media’s parent company.