America's most misspelled words in 2026
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Below is a guest post by Randoh Sallihall:
Analysis of Google search data for 2026 reveals the most misspelled words for each U.S. state and America.
National Spelling Bee will be held from May 26 to May 28. The research is well timed.
America's most misspelled words:
- Bougie – 134 400 searches.
- Favorite – 128 400 searches.
- Through – 127 200 searches.
- Business – 123 600 searches.
- Tomorrow – 121 200 searches.
- Because – 106 800 searches.
- Definitely – 104 400 searches.
- Beautiful – 102 000 searches.
- Niece – 100 800 searches.
- Separate – 98 400 searches.
America's most misspelled words by state:
- Alabama – Business
- Alaska – Beautiful
- Arizona – Through
- Arkansas – Beautiful
- California – Different
- Colorado – Color
- Connecticut – Recommend
- Delaware – Beautiful
- Florida – School
- Georgia – Chihuahua
- Hawaii – Appreciate
- Idaho – Necessary
- Illinois – Color
- Indiana – Because
- Iowa – Character
- Kansas – Schedule
- Kentucky – Definitely
- Louisiana – Restaurant
- Maine – Definitely
- Maryland – Business
- Massachusetts – Schedule
- Michigan – Which
- Minnesota – Ukulele
- Mississippi – Business
- Missouri – Because
- Montana – Appreciate
- Nebraska – Congratulations
- Nevada – Teacher
- New Hampshire – Bougie
- New Jersey – Because
- New Mexico – Sincerely
- New York – Judgement
- North Carolina – Spaghetti
- North Dakota – Adios
- Ohio – Because
- Oklahoma – Chihuahua
- Oregon – Diamond
- Pennsylvania – Maintenance
- Rhode Island – Bougie
- South Carolina – Quite
- South Dakota – Congratulations
- Tennessee – Through
- Texas – Recycle
- Utah – Basically
- Vermont – Beautiful
- Virginia – Spaghetti
- Washington – Fiance
- West Virginia – Beautiful
- Wisconsin – Business
- Wyoming – Chihuahua
A spokesperson for Unscramblerer.com commented on the findings:
"Analyzing Americas list of most misspelled words for 2026 we found silent letters, irregular vowel sounds, tricky suffixes, difficult consonant blends, schwa sounds, weird double letters, French and Spanish loanwords that break every phonics rule. English spelling and pronunciation is often irregular. Words that contain silent letters: business (silent i), through (silent gh), schedule (silent c), character (silent h), beautiful (silent eau). Words with irregular vowel sounds: through (ou), beautiful (eau), because (au), restaurant (au), bougie (ou). Words that use tricky suffixes like -ly, -ate, -ent, -ious: definitely (-itely), beautiful (-iful), necessary (-ary), maintenance (-ance), appreciate (-ciate), congratulations (-ulations). Words that contain difficult consonant blends: school (sch), quite (qu), spaghetti (sp), chihuahua (ch), through (thr), which (wh). Words with double consonants: business (ss), tomorrow (rr, mm), recommend (mm), different (ff), necessary (ss). Studies show that reliance on autocorrect and AI deteriorates the authors spelling ability over time. To combat this digital amnesia we encourage everybody to search for the correct spelling of the word when a feeling of doubt arises. This becomes an educational moment. As the saying goes, use it or lose it."
Research was conducted by word unscrambling experts at Unscramblerer.com.
We analyzed Jan 1, 2026 – May 18, 2026 search data from Google Trends for "How do you spell" and "How to spell".
Methodology: We used Google Trends to discover the most misspelled words and Ahrefs to find the number of searches. Americas most misspelled words can be discovered in Google Trends by searching for "How do you spell" and "How to spell". Ahrefs shows many variations of misspelling searches like "spell favorite" or "how do I spell tomorrow". We added up 120 search variations of top spelling searches.
Above is a guest post by Randoh Sallihall.
Maybe someone can tell me what happened to the 'r' on the way from bourgeois to bougie?
Robert Coren said,
May 22, 2026 @ 9:06 am
At the beginning of my junior year in high school, my English teacher handed out a list of "The 335 most frequently misspelled words in the English language", with a warning that a misspelling of any one of them in a paper would result in a grade reduction of one step (e.g. A- to B+, B to B-, etc.). I don't remember the contents of the list, except that I noted with momentary surprise that "its" was one of them. "Bougie" was certainly not on the list, having not yet entered the language in 1962.
Andreas Johansson said,
May 22, 2026 @ 9:07 am
"Beautiful" has a silent "eau"? What were they trying to say? Silent "ea" because "butiful" would have been a more regular spelling?
Jeffrey Kallberg said,
May 22, 2026 @ 9:08 am
A poignant narrative as we travel alphabetically from North Carolina to Oklahoma: "Spaghetti adios because chihuahua."
And what would have led the onrush of Minnesotans to spell "ukulele"?
Rodger C said,
May 22, 2026 @ 9:29 am
since when does "schedule" have a silent "c" in American English?
jhh said,
May 22, 2026 @ 9:56 am
One of *my* frequent errors is on the list: because…. BUT! Is this list ONLY reporting words that people looked up because they were unsure, or is it also including typos that were autocorrected? My head knows how to spell "because," but my fingers don't always pay careful attention!
anon said,
May 22, 2026 @ 10:15 am
Because the orthography is suck at spelling. Maybe these "misspelling" incidents are mostly mistyping rather than misspelling. There is no universal rule to the phonetic realizations of English words.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 22, 2026 @ 11:41 am
Re the lack of "r" in "bougie," my first hypothesis would be that the word first rose to popularity among non-rhotic speakers (esp. African-American). Indeed, one online source gives the following potential pronunciations of "bourgeois" just for AmEng: /bʊɹʒˈwɑː/, /ˈbʊɹʒ.wɑː/, /bʊʒˈwɑː/, /ˈbʊʒ.wɑː/, and I suspect that at least some AmEng speakers who are generally rhotic nonetheless pronounce that particular word without the /ɹ/. In any event, if you heard the word from the mouth of a non-rhotic speaker it might not be the sort of lexeme where a rhotic speaker would automatically/subconciously rhoticize the pronunciation they'd heard before uttering it themselves.
More generally, because the word evolved as slang, and likely slang used more in conversation than in writing, why should we accept the implicit assumption that it has a single standard spelling? "Bougie" may be the most common alternative, but why treat it as the only acceptable one, at least pending further developments? To partially answer my own question, an unrelated "bougie" has long existed in high-register written English as the jargon-name of a particular sort of medical instrument, presumably so named for being shaped vaguely like a candle ("bougie," in French). So if that "bougie" was already in the dictionaries of spell-checking software by the 1990's, it could have helped that spelling of the newish slang word vis-a-vis rival spellings that might have been equally plausible in the abstract. The French word, FWIW, eventually came to also mean "spark plug" (because of the shape, presumably), and as taken into modern Greek as a loanword (μπουζί) apparently only means spark plug, with no hint of candle.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 22, 2026 @ 11:53 am
Just further to my prior comment, you can find "boozhwah" as an eye-dialect alternative spelling of "bourgeois" in the google books corpus back to the early 20th century, I think at least sometimes in the mouths of characters who are not obviously non-rhotic as a general matter. Mostly I think in American texts, although that's a superficial impression that might be contradicted by more careful investigation. But clipping "boozhwah" to something like "boozhy," however spelled, seems like a straightforward development.
You'd have to dig deeper than I have into the examples to figure out what motivated the various uses of the "boozhwah" spelling rather than just typing out "bourgeois." Maybe sometimes it's just jocular? Maybe sometimes it's intended to signal that "bourgeois" as such would be an oddly high-falutin' word for the register the character is speaking in? Maybe other possibilities?
J.W. Brewer said,
May 22, 2026 @ 12:07 pm
Just one more datapoint on the spelling of /ˈbuːʒi/ in the slang-word sense. I think I may have first become consciously aware of the lexeme around the time that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_and_Boujee was a popular song, so 2016-17. Note the "boujee" alternative orthography in the song title. Around the same time I noticed it had become something of a vogue word among white teenage suburban girls, but it's unclear whether it had just arrived in that demographic (at least in my part of the country) or whether it had been there for a while but my own older daughter and her friends had just recently gotten old enough to add a preexisting teen lexeme to their lexicons.
Julian Hook said,
May 22, 2026 @ 4:51 pm
The notion that the "most misspelled" words are the words whose spellings people try to find from Google seems suspect to me. Judging from student papers, I would say the most misspelled word in the English language is "its" (as Robert Cohen hinted), but I don't suppose many people google that one.
Julian Hook said,
May 22, 2026 @ 4:58 pm
Muphry's [sic] Law in action: If I'm writing about spelling, I ought to proofread more carefully. Coren, not Cohen. So sorry.
David Morris said,
May 22, 2026 @ 5:19 pm
When I'm unsure of the spelling of a word, I simply start typing it into the search bar. Google will either autocomplete, or show dictionary entries if I'm right or 'do you mean [correct spelling]?' if I'm wrong.
Michael Vnuk said,
May 22, 2026 @ 6:43 pm
Because I was glancing ahead and not concentrating, for a brief moment I thought that the list of 'America's most misspelled words by state' was 'America's most misspelled state'. I wonder what the answer would be. Massachusetts? Connecticut?
Chester Draws said,
May 22, 2026 @ 7:04 pm
I agree with Julian: this is a list of the words that Americans realise that they can't spell.
Although I would go with "they're" as the most commonly misspelled word on the internet. Certainly as a percentage of the number of times it is written.
A Little of This and That | Namely JT said,
May 23, 2026 @ 5:03 am
[…] Over at Language Log a guest post details America’s most misspelled words in 2026: […]
Peter Cyrus said,
May 23, 2026 @ 7:58 am
Not mentioned in Unscramblerer's list of causes is vowel reduction. Writing the reduced vowels as they sound would not only reduce the rate of errors, but it would also indicate stress pretty well with no diacritics.
Robert Coren said,
May 23, 2026 @ 2:31 pm
No problem; but for a choice made by my father in 1938 you would have been right.
Victor Mair said,
May 23, 2026 @ 3:17 pm
Not sure what you're referring to.
Philip Taylor said,
May 23, 2026 @ 3:54 pm
Probably "Coren, not Cohen. So sorry.", Victor.
Chas Belov said,
May 23, 2026 @ 4:34 pm
I am croggled at the idea that Minnesotans misspell "which."
I don't normally have cause to say or spell "bourgeois" but I mind-hear it without the r and certainly would have spelled it without one had I tried to write it. (Which I didn't attempt. Its (had to correct that) presence in the preceding sentence was courtesy of copy and paste.
David Holdeman said,
May 23, 2026 @ 7:25 pm
Seeing "favorite" and "color" on these lists, I'm curious if "favourite" and "colour" were considered misspellings.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 23, 2026 @ 9:15 pm
Yeah well "fiance" is misspelled. And the chances that any real metric says "school", "quite", "which", "color", and "teacher" are the "most misspelled words" in their respective states are… low.
Michael Watts said,
May 24, 2026 @ 7:29 am
That's odd. In my idea of American English, an unstressed syllable can't really support the vowel /ɑ/; those options would have to be /bɚʒˈwɑː/, /ˈbɚʒ.wə/, /bʊʒˈwɑː/, and /ˈbʊʒ.wə/.
It's also odd that this source doesn't give any pronunciations in which the vowel of the first syllable is /u/. Merriam-Webster has /ˈbʊɹʒˌwɑː/, /ˈbʊʒˌwɑː/, /ˈbuʒˌwɑː/, or /bʊɹʒˈwɑː/.
(Note that Merriam-Webster does not admit the possibility of /tu(ə)ɹ/ for the word "tour", which is obligatorily pronounced with that vowel. They have only /tʊɹ/, /tɔɹ/, and /taʊ(ə)ɹ/. I'm not sure what the thinking is there, but it might explain why they don't list /buɹˈʒwɑː/.
They also draw some kind of distinction between "nurse" /nɚs/ and "sure" /ʃʊɹ/. This distinction is not apparent in e.g. the audio examples they provide. I have no idea what it's meant to represent.)
Robert Coren said,
May 24, 2026 @ 9:20 am
Yes, I was replying to Julian Hook's apology for misspelling my name, and now it's my turn to apologize for not specifying to whom I was replying, as I had intended to do.
Benjamin said,
May 24, 2026 @ 10:33 am
Whoever wrote that press release needs to learn how to spell "author's".
Viseguy said,
May 24, 2026 @ 9:00 pm
What's the deal with "judgement" for New York? It's overwhelmingly "judgment" in NY and elsewhere, as Google NGram amply demonstrates. I pronounce this list highly dub
bious.HS said,
June 1, 2026 @ 11:17 pm
This post on America's "most misspelled words" (or "mis-spelt", as I would spell it!) as determined by Unscramblerer is described as a "guest post", suggesting it was specifically written for Languagelog, but it has in fact been widely reproduced or reported on in the news media and some of the news reports date from before it appeared here. It is doubtless fun and amusing, especially for linguistically and statistically naive Americans looking up the alleged "most misspelled" word in their own state, but it seems to me to be of very dubious value as any sort of serious analysis, for several reasons, some of which have been noted by other commenters but also for a glaringly obvious statistical reason which nobody has mentioned (perhaps it's so obviously that nobody has thought it worth mentioning!).
As others have noted, this is apparently a list of the words that people have deliberately googled the spelling of, and that is a completely different thing from words that are actually mis-spelt. If you really want to look at the most mis-spelt words, you would presumably need to look at corpus data, and I don't know whether any suitable corpus would be available (it would obviously have to be unedited data). However, I strongly suspect that any school teacher could give a better list of the most mis-spelt words than the one given here. As other commenters have suggested, I think the most mis-spelt words would actually be things like "its" / "it's" and "they're" / "their" / "there" (and also things like "alot" for "a lot" and "anymore" when it should be "any more").
Even if you take these figures to represent counts of actual mis-spellings (which they are not) they probably ought to be adjusted for the actual frequency of the words themselves. People may search for the spelling of a common word like "because" more frequently than a rare word like, say, "fuchsia", and there are probably more actual instances of "because" being mis-spelt than "fuschia" in absolute terms, but that's just because "because" is a much more common word than "fuschia". I'd expect "fuschia" to be mis-spelt a lot more often than "because" in percentage terms, and that's what I would take the term "most misspelled" to mean. (Or maybe I would take it as some kind of combination of mis-spelt in absolute terms and mis-spelt in percentage terms.)
But most importantly, this analysis is statistically naive and fails to take into account the actual size of these counts and the variation associated with them.
First of all, at the national level the alleged most mis-spelt words were apparently searched for around 125000 times (98400 to 134400 for the top ten). America has a population of approximately 340 million. Remove children and the elderly (who I think are unlikely to be googling these things), remove people without internet access (I have no idea how many this would be in America), reduce it a bit to allow for people who are languishing in ICE detention centres or prisons in El Salvador, or have died in the latest mass school shootings or because they couldn't afford health care, or because they are anti-vax nutters or survivalist nutters living incommunicado in underground bunkers in the backwoods of Montana or somewhere, and that probably leaves around 250 million. So approximately one in 2000 Americans have apparently explicitly googled how to spell "because" and "tomorrow" and "beautiful" and all those other listed words. But that's only for the first six months of 2026, so on an annual basis it would be one in 1000. I find that a bit hard to believe – it seems much too high to me. I've personally never explicitly googled how to spell a word in my life, or at least not with an actual query like "how do you spell [ x]", which is apparently what they looked for. If I didn't know how to spell a word I'd probably just enter a guessed spelling in the search bar, or write it in a word processor with a spelling checker (though admittedly my search habits are probably different from those of the Youth Of Today). We're told they "added up 120 search variations of top spelling searches". I'd like to see exactly what those search variations were and what numbers came out of them individually and how they were combined. Also, even if these counts are correct, not all of those searches will represent unique people. Many probably represent repeat searches by the same people, and that fact alone makes the results of dubious value.
Secondly, there is no mention of the margin of error in these figures. Strictly speaking these counts are exact figures but they still have variation associated with them in the sense that if you repeated the same search next year you would get different counts even though probably nothing would have essentially changed in the world, including people's propensity to mis-spell words. Or similarly, if you looked at the counts on a month-by-month basis you would get different counts for each month and quite possibly different orders for the top words, even though nothing would have essentially changed from one month to the next. This just reflects the inherent random variation in lots of individual people choosing whether to make an actual google query or not. Counts like this have a variation proportional to the square-root of the count (assuming each search can be considered an independent random draw, and analysing it as a binomial distribution). For counts of around 125,000 the 95% confidence interval for the difference between any two of them will be approximately sqrt(2) x 2 x sqrt(125,000) = 1000 (a suspiciously round-looking number at first sight, but of course sqrt(2) x 2 x sqrt(125000) = sqrt(2) x 2 x sqrt(250000/2) = 2 x 500 = 1000). The top 10 counts at the nation-wide level all differ from their neighbours by more than this, so it looks like the differences are significant (for whatever these counts are actually measuring), although some of them are pretty close and I suspect most people probably wouldn't consider the differences to be of practical significance. The count for "bougie" is 6000 more than the second place getter, which is highly significant, so it looks like it genuinely is the most searched for word, which is hardly surprising given that it is a fairly new word with an unusual spelling and pronunciation.
But when you get down to the individual state level things are completely different. The US has a population of around 340 million. Scale those counts down by a factor of 10 to a population of 34 million (which would correspond to a very large state like Texas), and the counts will be around 12,500 with differences between them of a few hundred, and the errors on the differences will be sqrt(2) x 2 x sqrt(12,500) or approximately 300. (If the counts scale down by a factor of 10, the errors only scale down by a factor of sqrt(10). ) So the errors of the differences will be around the size of the differences and there will be no good reason to think that the differences are significant.
Now scale down to a population of 3.4 million (which is around the size of a small state like Utah or Nevada) and the top counts will be around 1250 with differences between them of a few tens, and the errors on the differences will be around 100, i.e. the errors will completely swamp the differences and the differences will be statistically meaningless. (Of course, the actual counts will not scale down uniformly like this across all the words, precisely because of the statistical variation involved – which is precisely the point I'm making!)
I can see that there could well be some genuine differences in which words are most mis-spelt in different states due to different regional accents, different proportions of Black Americans or Hispanics, different regional cultures, or other causes. There may be differences relating purely to geography or even one-off factors. Maybe the French influence somehow means people in Louisiana genuinely do query the spelling of "restaurant" more. Maybe there was a one-off ukelele convention in Minnesota. Maybe there are different educational standards between states. But I can't see any particular reason why there would be significant differences between states for words like "because" or "beautiful" or "which" or "necessary".
The cynic in me notes that we are not given any actual counts at the individual state level, or even what the top ten words were. If we were, it seems likely to me that all the counts at the state level would be small, there would be a large number of words shared in common between many or all the states, and the actual counts for any particular word would bounce around randomly between states, and between months and years for a particular state, and the word that comes out top in any state in any particular year would be essentially purely random. It's possible there may be some statistically significant results for the largest states like California, Texas, Florida, and New York, but I'd be a bit surprised if there were for the smaller states.
In order to assess whether these results are statistically significant we should be given the counts for the top ten words for each individual state, not just at the overall national level. It would also be very useful if the list at the national level was expanded to the top 100 or so, so that we could see how words that feature at the state level like "school", "beautiful", "recommend" etc actually fit in at the national level. However I very much doubt that Unscramblerer would release that information.
Out of interest I looked up the most mis-spelt words for 2025 as given by Unscramblerer and they are as follows:
1 Definitely
2 Separate
3 Necessary
4 Believe
5 Through
6 Gorgeous
7 Neighbor
8 Business
9 Favorite
10 Restaurant
"Bougie" isn't there and it looks like it is a genuinely significant addition for 2026, but many of the other words for 2026 are there in the top ten, just in a different order, which reflects the statistical point I'm making. Also, "restaurant", which was the favourite in Louisiana in 2026 but didn't feature in the top 10 nation-wide, is there in the top 10 in 2025. It probably just dropped out of the top 10 in 2026 but may well still be in the top 20 – but we are only given the top 10 so we don't really know. I haven't looked up earlier years (I've got better things to do with my time) but I strongly suspect they would show much the same thing – a pool of much the same words with the order bouncing around essentially randomly between years (and this is at the national level – the randomness will be more pronounced at the state level).
So while this may be a fun and amusing post for the general public, from a statistical point of view I think it's probably largely worthless, especially when reporting the "most misspelled word" at the state level.
P.S. Looking at their commentary, when were "-ly", "-ate", and "-ent" ever "tricky suffixes"? I don't see anything "tricky" about them. And when were "sp", "ch", and "thr" "difficult consonant blends"? They are completely standard parts of English orthography (and "ch" and the "th" of "thr" aren't even "blends" anyway.) And the sentence "Studies show that reliance on autocorrect and AI deteriorates the authors spelling ability over time" is simply ungrammatical for me (quite apart from the fact that "authors" is missing an apostrophe, as Benjamin notes). You can't use "deteriorate" transitively like this in my variety of English – you would say "causes the author's spelling to deteriorate over time". A quick google search suggests that you can use it transitively in American English, but apparently even there it is rare.
(Apologies for the long comment, but the inner statistician in me takes issue with the statistically naive results presented in this post without any indication or discussion of the variation involved.)
Philip Taylor said,
June 2, 2026 @ 2:32 am
I think, HS, and with respect, "-ent" is "a tricky suffix", in that (for example) "dominant" takes -ant while "different" takes -ent. And "-ly" and "-ate" would be tricky suffices for those whose spelling is guided solely by sound rather than by exposure to the printed form.