Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings

The lists of common spelling mistakes linked below are used to correct typographical errors throughout Wikipedia. Each entry lists a typo, followed by the correct spelling in parentheses; clicking on the typo will search for it throughout Wikipedia. See Typo for information on and coordination of spellchecking work.

Note that not all occurrences of these spellings will be misspellings: if they are in song titles, for instance, they must be left as the song writer intended (but it is worth checking back to sources); if they are in transliterations such as "Tao Te Ching" or in pieces of text in languages other than English then they may also be correct. The guiding rule should be to include words if they are more likely to be incorrect spellings than correct spellings even if it means that occasionally there will be false positives.

Keep in mind some words could be corrected to multiple different possibilities and some are names of brands, songs, or products. These are just the most common. Please don't delete a misspelling from this page just because it causes false positives. A better way of getting rid of false positives is to comment them out. This can be done by changing the initial asterisk (*) on a line into a colon. Doing this will make it easy to put potential spelling errors back if you want to re-run a check for them at some future time.

A misspelling should occur in Wikipedia at least once a year to be considered "common" and therefore have a place in this list. If you know a certain misspelling has not occurred in the past year, you should delete it from the list to reduce clutter and make the lists easier to use.

When adding a misspelling, it is a good idea to also add all grammatical variants of the word at the same time. Alphabetize according to the misspelling.

Note that spellings sometimes vary between varieties of English, notably between American English and Commonwealth English. Since Wikipedia accepts all variant spellings, please refer to American and British English spelling differences.

Many users have found that using Google to search for misspelled words is more efficient than Wikipedia, such as this Google search.

Alternatively you can search a recent database dump for typos in a few minutes using User:Bluemoose/DataBaseSearchTool. This works best when the database is not very old.