Research
Six analyses computed from the data on PlainSpell (September 2025 to August 2026 for search, the English Wiktionary of September 2, 2026 for words): what people misspell in search, how well spelling rules hold across the word list, and how many words English has.
Analyses
- The words Americans misspell most in search
People in the United States search 5,499 wrong spellings of 3,886 English words often enough for Bing to report them: about 1,143,140 searches a month in all.
- Misspelled in search, spelled right in writing
For 1,959 misspellings measured both ways, the wrong spelling takes a median 3.7% of searches for the word but a median 0.07% of its written uses: in the median case a misspelling is 47 times more common, relatively, in the search box than on the published page.
- Does “i before e except after c” work?
Across 767 English words in common written use that contain ie or ei, the rule holds 456 times and fails 158 times (74.3% right); 156 more pairs are not counted, their i and e being in different syllables or parts of the word (method below).
- How many words does English have?
The English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026) has 689,006 English headwords outside proper names. 101,394 of them occur at least once in 100 million words of written English, and 20,399 at least once in a million.
- American and British spelling, counted
The English Wiktionary gives 364 pairs of English words in written use as American or British spellings of each other.
- The most common letters in English
In running English text the most common letter is E (11.94% of letters), then T and A; in the dictionary's word list it is E (10.47%).
Sources: the English Wiktionary (dump of September 2, 2026), wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media), and Bing searches in the United States (September 2025 to August 2026). Each analysis states its own sources, dates, method and limits.