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Spelling & Misspelling
You can use the web as a spell checker, and search the Internet for
misspelled words just for the entertainment:
- Spelling. You can use the web as a kind of
huge spell checker if you don't have anything else handy. For example, let's
say you aren't sure of the
spelling of "committee".
You can search on the most likely options, commitee, comitee, committee,
and the search that returns the most hits is correct. This is a very reliable
check, since fortunately more people spell words correctly than incorrectly,
engines have such large databases that they provide a statistically extremely
sample. If you are anywhere close, Google will also provide a likely spelling
correction suggestion at the top of the results page..
- Misspelling. For good reasons and bad, many people have created sites
with domain names that are misspellings of well known site names, and they
count on people dropping into their site by mistake when they misspell the
legitimate site's name. Commercial organizations usually bring lawsuits to
close these copycat sites down.
In a similar idea, we can search the web for misspellings of words for pure entertainment.
It is interesting to find the number of sites that have misspelled pretty much
any word you can think of, in almost any way you can think of. For example, it
is amazing how many pages there are containing the words zology, orgnization,
Even more challenging is searching for multiple misspellings that still return
results, like commitee