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Sunday, May 26, 2019

What word does your state have the most difficulty spelling?

Map image copied from The Washington Post; for a clearer version use the link below.
"Why are people from so many states searching 'How to spell beautiful' on Google?" asks Herman Wong of The Washington Post, reporting on the search company's annual report of the word that people in each state ask it 'how to spell.'

"Beautiful" has "been a common top word in the past three years," Wong reports. "In 2019, a 'beautiful' belt runs from Virginia through the Carolinas and Georgia into Florida." The word is also tops in Texas, California and Illinois, states with large numbers of immigrants.

Google "does not say when the searches were made, nor provide additional context for the searches," Wong writes. "The company did not immediately respond to an email inquiry Friday, so we are left to our own imagination." OK, why is "Hawaii" the most-searched-for spelling word in Hawaii? We suspect because of tourists using the internet there.

What about "bougie" in New York? We had to, well, Google it. The definition is "a thin, flexible surgical instrument for exploring or dilating a passage of the body," but UrbanDictionary.com says it means "aspiring to be a higher class than one is; derived from bourgeois - meaning middle/upper class." USA Today's Sophia Tulp wrote in 2017, "It’s an equal-opportunity jab at anyone from hipsters and the coastal elite to the suburban or basic. The 'boujee' variation (used by Migos in 'Bad and Boujee') commonly refers to middle-class or upwardly mobile black people."

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