article
FILE-Image of people playing the word game Scrabble. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images)
There are words in the English language that trip us up occasionally because they’re either hard to spell or pronounce.
It can be a pain figuring out the proper spelling of some words and then later having to correct it in a text message, social media post, or document.
But WordTips put together a list of the most common misspelled words to help boost your spelling abilities.
RELATED: Wordle now has a new recommended starting word
The most misspelled word in the U.S. and 47 countries is "coolly," which means casual or nonchalant. According to WordTips, people are caught off guard by the second "l" in the word they and prefer to go with the incorrect "cooly." But cool is an adjective but when it’s used as an adverb, the "ly" has to be added.
The majority of English-speaking countries, the U.S., UK, Canada, and Australia, each have "coolly" and "minuscule" listed as their most-misspelled words, according to WordTips.
The 10 most misspelled words in the U.S.
1) Coolly (common misspelling: Cooly)
2) Minuscule (common misspelling: Miniscule)
3) Sergeant (common misspelling: Sargent)
4) Liaison (common misspelling: Liason)
5) Protester (common misspelling: Protestor)
6) Supersede (common misspelling: Supercede)
7) Drunkenness (common misspelling: Drunkeness)
8) Millennium (common misspellings: Millenium, Milennium)
9) Dumbbell (common misspellings: Dumbell)
10) Bellwether (common misspellings: Bellweather)
WordTips also put together a list of the most misspelled words in the every state. "Foreign" and "promise" are each misspelled at a higher than average rate in three U.S. states, more than any other word, according to the website.
Here’s a list of the most misspelled words for each U.S. state.
The most misspelled words in every state
1) Ignorance (Washington State)
2) Height (Oregon)
3) Exceed (California)
4) Promise (Nevada)
5) Accidentally (Idaho)
6) Experience (Montana)
7) Address (Wyoming)
8) Outrageous (Utah)
9) Playwright (Arizona)
10) Extreme (Colorado)
11) Parliament (New Mexico)
12) Occasion (North Dakota)
13) Foreign (South Dakota)
14) Reference (Nebraska)
15) Maintenance (Kansas)
16) Writing (Oklahoma)
17) Similar (Texas)
18) Becoming (Minnesota)
19) Neighbor (Iowa)
20) Height (Missouri)
21) Column (Arkansas)
22) Kernel (Louisiana)
23) Foreign (Wisconsin)
24) Neighbor (Iowa)
25) Neighbor (Illinois)
26) Acknowledge (Indiana)
27) Acquaintance (Michigan)
28) Maintenance (Kentucky)
29) Parliament (Tennessee)
30) Medieval (Ohio)
31) Ignorance (Mississippi)
32) Original (Alabama)
33) Secretary (Georgia)
34) Jewelry (Florida)
35) Promise (North Carolina)
36) Promise (South Carolina)
37) Controversy (Virginia)
38) Upholstery (West Virginia)
39) Willful (Pennsylvania)
40) Conscious (District of Columbia)
41) Twelfth (Maryland)
42) Foreign (Delaware)
43) Advisable (New Jersey)
44) Jewelry (Connecticut)
45) Guidance (Rhode Island)
46) Becoming (Massachusetts)
47) Upholstery (New York)
48) Definitely (Vermont)
49) Amateur (New Hampshire)
50) Almost (Maine)
How was the list put together?
The online word-finding tool started with a list of the 350 most misspelled words in the English language, writing down the correct spellings of words and the most common misspellings.
WordTips collected a sample of over two billion tweets from around the world and listed the word from each country with the highest percentage of misspellings, the website noted.
The group then repeated this process for every state in the U.S.
This story was reported from Washington, D.C.
