About PlainSpell
PlainSpell is a spelling reference for English. It gives the spelling, meaning, pronunciation and forms of 80,560 English words from the English Wiktionary, measures how people misspell 3,886 of them in search, and explains 340,139 Spanish, French, German and Portuguese words in English.
Why a spelling site measures anything
A dictionary tells you the right spelling; it rarely tells you which wrong spellings people actually type, or how often. PlainSpell puts the two side by side: the entry as the English Wiktionary gives it, and next to it the wrong forms that Bing users in the United States search for, counted month by month. A misspelling appears here only when it has been measured, so the lists stay short and real.
Whose site is this?
PlainSpell is published by Kiznis Studio, which owns it and is responsible for it: what it shows, how each count is made, and correcting what is wrong (the terms say what the site does not promise). It is an independent studio whose sites each take one subject and one set of open sources. Mail to hello@plainspell.com is read by the studio's operator, who looks a reported mistake up in the source before changing a page.
How do I check a page?
Follow the source line. Below each definition, count and chart sits the name of the dataset it came from and that dataset's date; a word's entry links to the Wiktionary page it quotes. The monthly search counts are the averages Bing and Google report for the United States. The research pages offer their tables as CSV downloads, and the methodology sets out each step and where a figure stops being reliable.
Who writes the pages?
No one writes a word page by hand. A program loads the Wiktionary extracts, the wordfreq list and the search counts into a database, and each page is assembled from its word's row when you open it, in fixed sentence patterns. AI tools were used to build the program and the designs and to draft the research and help pages; those drafts are compared with the database before they go up. Definitions stay in Wiktionary's wording, credited; numbers are read from the database, never generated.
What PlainSpell does not do
It does not decide usage. When Wiktionary marks a form as American, British, nonstandard or a misspelling, PlainSpell repeats the label and credits it. It has no tie to the Wikimedia Foundation, Wiktionary, Microsoft, Google or DataForSEO, and nothing on it is professional advice: it is a reference.
Who pays for it?
Ads from Journey by Mediavine. No advertiser chooses the words covered or the content shown. For the scripts that run on the site and the data they keep, see privacy.
Found a mistake?
Tell us at hello@plainspell.com, with the page and what looks wrong. Each fix is dated on the corrections page, and the editorial policy describes what happens to a report.