Report: ‘Connecticut’ is among most misspelled words in Google searches
The Nutmeg State’s name has been butchered from the time Adriaen Block sailed up the Connecticut River in 1614.
A website has now discovered that “Connecticut” is one of the most misspelled words in monthly Google searches, the Associated Press reported. The No. 1 mangled word in the U.S., according to the artificial intelligence writing platform, QuillBot, is “calendar,” a chronic struggle for 250,000 each month who typically substitute an “e” for the second “a” to make “calender.”
With 20,000 misspelled entries each month, “Connecticut” is the eighth-most botched word, right behind “believe.” People often drop the internal, silent “c” in the state name to render “Conneticut,” the same mistake made with the second-most misspelled word in QuillBot’s calculations — “arctic,” which is often entered as “artic.”
A QuillBot representative could not be reached to answer who is searching for “Connecticut” (out-ofstaters or residents who don’t know how to spell the name of their own state?) or why “Mississippi” isn’t in the top 10.
Hartford Courant columnist John Lacy wrote in 1982 that Connecticut colonists could not agree on how to spell the name of the territory, which comes from an Algonquian word meaning “long tidal river.” Various spellings on maps
and documents of the day included “Connegticut,” “Quinnatucquet,” “Quenticutt,” Quonektacut” and “Kwinitegah.”
In “Connecticut Place
Names,” published in 1976, authors Arthur H. Hughes and Morse S. Allen noted that translating the Native American dialect into writing was “extremely difficult”
for early settlers, according to another Courant story.
“They couldn’t replicate some sounds,” according to the story, “which they considered
heathen jargon that made no sense; they had no consistent spelling rules; and the Native Americans supplying the information may not have understood what the questioner was asking.”
“Once a name — right or wrong — had been passed on to white scribes or mapmakers, they altered it as they saw fit. This is why some names have more than one spelling — Mattabesset, Mattabassett, and even Mattabesec, for example.”
The river that runs from Enfield and Suffield to Old Lyme and Old Saybrook became the name of the colony and state because it was central to both the Native Americans and the colonists, who settled first on the riverside in Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford.
“Rivers often maintained their Indigenous origins,” University of Amherst Professor Stephen Olbrys Gencarella wrote in Connecticut Magazine, “because they traversed numerous settlements and were not privatized, although some took English monikers over time. Quinnehtukqut, the area on ‘the long tidal river,’ generated the name for a colony and the state itself.”
Walt Woodward, Connecticut state historian emeritus and former UConn professor, said early spelling variations of the Connecticut colony also reflected different Algonquian dialects. As for current problems getting the state’s name right, Woodward said, “As somebody who taught college for 20 years, I’m not surprised that people misspell anything.”