In case you missed it, Google Trends recently researched the hardest-to-spell words in the first four months of this year. Their analysis identified what words was searched most often when people typed “how to spell ___” into the Google search engine. The results were tabulated by state, then published in this map.
According to a New York Times article by Christopher Mele that analyzed the results, “beautiful” was the most searched word overall (tops in five states), with “pneumonia” coming in second (four states). Otherwise, there seemed to be no discernible pattern. The most-searched word in Arkansas was “chihuahua”, in Georgia it was “gray”. Somehow, “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (from Disney’s Mary Poppins) was first in Connecticut. And the most-searched in Wisconsin was (wait for it) “Wisconsin”!
How hard is spelling? It’s pretty hard; even the original map contained a misspelling. Washington, D.C.’s word, “ninety”, was wrong when the map was first published, although the error was corrected within a few hours.
The map is published at https://www.yahoo.com/news/map-apos-america-apos-most-142909048.html.