The National Spelling Bee—the one on ESPN every year—is this week, and in its honor, Google Trends posted the most misspelled words in each state by finding out which word is preceded most by “how to spell.”
Most of the words are fairly predictable.
America's most misspelled words – it's #spellingbee week and we mapped top "how to spell" searches by state#dataviz pic.twitter.com/oHkRHj8Eku
— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) May 30, 2017
“Beautiful” is tough. I learned this week after my dog got diarrhea that, like New Hampshire, I do not know how to spell “diarrhea.” I am from Iowa and have never spelled “vacuum” correctly.
But then there’s Wisconsin, which doesn’t know how to spell … Wisconsin.
As an Iowan who has to constantly convince people that Wisconsin sucks, this makes me quite happy. And I don’t know how this is possible, since Wisconsin is a very easy state to spell. It’s spelled exactly like it sounds. There’s really no ambiguity.
The only possible answer is T-Pain.
https://twitter.com/rarekeith/status/869620508169469952
This isn’t Wisconsin’s first spelling mistake. One Badgers fan tried to troll NC State with a billboard in Raleigh by thanking Russell Wilson (Wilson started at NC State, then transferred to Wisconsin) but spelled Wilson’s name wrong.
On Capital Blvd in Raleigh. Unbelievable! I hate Badgers!! pic.twitter.com/rmOJjVxXm2
— Daniel Parks (@DanBParksJr) January 29, 2014
Anyways, let’s all laugh at Wisconsin. I can attest from past experience that it’s a lot of fun and helps you forget about your state’s own failing.
Speaking of, there are a lot of us who should be embarrassed:
- Rhode Island doesn’t know how to spell “liar,” which seems like it should be easy to spell. (Rhode Islander and Comeback Media’s Ken Fang notes that it’s hard to spell when you pronounce it “ly-ah.”)
- South Dakota can’t spell “college,” which also seems pretty surprising.
- New Mexico needs to listen to more Gwen Stefani.
- Hawaii can’t spell “people,” but to be fair, they can probably spell “brah” just fine as a substitute.
- Connecticut and West Virginia are apparently very interested in learning how to spell a fictional word created by Mary Poppins.
- Bostonians can’t spell “license” because presumably none of them have them with their (lack 0f) driving skills.
Moral of the story: We all suck at spelling. Even Google.
The ironic thing when they first posted the map was they spelled ninety incorrectly pic.twitter.com/3QIS1bSJAi
— Gabriel Hurl (@gabehurl) May 30, 2017
