SPELLING: Spelling is hard.

According to AT&T, internet users often search for “how to spell” certain words. From March 2020 to March 2021, in Pennsylvania, those searches were for “how to spell coronavirus.”

The most common misspelling was “caronavirus.”

That wasn’t the only part of the pandemic that had folks confused. In 12 states, the most common spelling-related search was for the word quarantine. Sadly, the most common misspelling was this: “corn teen.”

We must confess, that misspelling caused us a little bit of pain. And here are some more cringeworthy misspellings: goverment, multiplycation, whatch, and excersice. (By the way, our computers corrected the misspellings, so we had to go back and tell it not to type them correctly. Makes us wonder how people were getting them wrong.)

Our neighbors in New York searched “how to spell definitely” most often. There were three common misspellings: “definitly, definately and defiantly.”

We searched on the site for the Oxford Dictionary to see what the most commonly misspelled words were.

Number 10: Accommodate; 9: Which; 8: Receive; 7: Until; 6: Occurred; 5: Separate; 4: Government; 3: Definitely; 2: Pharoah;

And the number one most misspelled word? Publicly.

We confess, as much as we try to always spell words correctly, we’re often tripped up by trying to type quickly. It’s easier than one might think to put the letters in incorrect order, like “teh” instead of the; or to hit the key next to the one intended, like “oublic” instead of public.

Like the old joke says, “bad spellers of the world untie!”