Google points out everyone's terrible spelling, and then misspells a word

Words like diarrhea, sauerkraut, pneumonia, chaos, vacuum and even hallelujah make the list.
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 

While Scripps National Spelling Bee this week tries to convince us that America can spell, Google has the state-by-state breakdown to prove otherwise.

The search engine revealed Tuesday which word comes up the most when people type in, "How to spell..." and the results are something else.

The results are telling -- Wisconsin looks up how to spell their own state name the most, while New Hampshire is worried about diarrhea and getting that right.

Google itself has some of its own spelling problems to sort out. Its original map spelled Washington D.C.'s most searched word as "nintey," which is definitely not how you spell out the number 90. It was corrected later, along with some incorrect letter counting, with a new map and legend marked as the "one to use."

Helpfully, or embarrassingly, Google broke down the searches by letter-length. Most searches are for six to 10 letter words, like California, New York, Minnesota, Kentucky and Ohio's "beautiful" or Illinois' "appreciate." Good old Pennsylvania really pulled through with "sauerkraut."

Some concernedly short search queries were "liar" in Rhode Island and "nanny" in Mississippi.

The two longest words hailed from West Virginia and Connecticut (way harder to spell than Wisconsin) and were the same: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins.

But the best finding was "tomorrow" topping searches in both Arizona and Colorado -- but with different letter lengths. In Arizona, searches for the word were six to 10 letters, while in Colorado they were 11 to 19 letters -- that's a lot of extra Ms and Rs.

Catch the spelling bee finals on Thursday -- they'll be on ESPN. Maybe "chihuahua" or "banana" will be the ultimate stumper. But probably not, considering last year's winning words were "gesellschaft" and "Feldenkrais."

Topics Google

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Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.

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