A map of Europe by the most commonly misspelled word

Most of us know our ABCs but due to the variety and diversity of the English language, there are certain words that catch us out when it comes to spelling.

Thanks to the invention of the printing press, English has been standardised since the 15th century when the Gutenberg Press started churning out books.

Without spelling, we would not have the English Dictionary or fun word games Scrabble, Countdown, or the squiggly red line on online documents.

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In the social media age, words get condensed to create short and snappy captions/tweets and misspelling is less of a no-no.

Some misspell to avoid detection and/or censorship. Others do it to save precious keystrokes and characters.

Meanwhile, “people are representing their spoken dialects more through spelling in spaces like Twitter and Instagram,” says Lauren Squires, an Ohio State University linguist.

WordTips decided to explore this by counting the common spelling mistakes on Twitter around the world to see who spells which words incorrectly the most.

To do this Word Tips started with a list of the 350 most misspelled words in the English language, noting down the correct spellings and the most common misspellings.

The team then analysed over two billion geotagged tweets from around the world and isolated the word in each country that had the highest percentage of misspellings (i.e., the most misspelled word).

“Coolly” is the most-misspelled word in 47 countries worldwide, more than any other word.

The majority of European countries such as France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Poland each have coolly and minuscule as their most-misspelled words.

Sergeant and millennium were also two words that were the most misspelled in some countries too.

The most mispelled words in EuropeWordTips

In particular, spelling coolly is a struggle for 44 per cent of Brits. Drunkenness, protestor and dumbbell also made the list, as these words are misspelled 26.1per cent, 25.2 per cent and 19.6 per cent of the time, respectively.

Here's the full table of countries from around the world along with their most mispelled word:

There you have it, looks like we could all brush up on our spelling skills...

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