Above: The world’s most beautifully designed search engine. Wikimedia Commons License.
That’s according to the very cool Typo of the Day for Librarians blog, which posts a single word each day and – by searching electronic catalogues – determines how high the chances are that it will be misspelled in those records. They also add a little snippet about the word in question, and when the name of the world’s best-loved fruit was chosen, I was happy to see that a mini-review of my book was included.
I think the first impression one might have on encountering this site is one of novelty, but there’s cool utility here, as well. Though modern search engines automatically recognize frequently misspelled words and do the correcting for you, but the TOTDFL blog is conducting real-time research in how mistakes appear and behave in both the digital realm and – via the collections that the databases link to – the analog world, as well.
According to the site – which solicits participation from librarians all over the world – he word “banana” has a low chance of being misspelled. The database the group searched found seven bad versions of the word (the commonly used “Bannana,” which most spell-checkers catch.)
Great site for word geeks, and thanks for making an example of me. I’m glad they didn’t comb my book for spelling errors, of which my readers have found over a dozen (one day, I promise, I’ll post a list of corrections – spelling and factual – here, so feel free to mail me your own lists of my screw-ups.)
,” and it came from Nicole Foucault, of Gatineau, Quebec, Canada, in the form of a word search puzzle which she created, using words and phrases related to the book and to birding.
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman 
