Though this is a somewhat “fun” piece, it’s also a serious topic.
In this day and age of GoogleTM searching, using all kinds of
online databases and more, you may find that you don’t get the results you seek
when you misspell a basic genealogy term.
After all, when we don’t spell a surname as it was written, assuming you
haven’t appropriately used wildcards symbols, you won’t get the results you
seek.
And, though GoogleTM is pretty good in that
if I put in geneology it will show the results for genealogy, unless I tell it
to do otherwise, you may find that other search engines or database interfaces
are not so forgiving when we misspell words.
It is a good idea to know whether a search function permits wildcards or
uses some other technology (e.g. GoogleTM uses stemming)
On the other hand, you
may find that someone with a key piece of data did use the word geneology vs
genealogy and if you stuck to just the correct spelling you would have missed
that gem!
You might want to check
out some other articles have been written on misspelled genealogy words:
- Don’t Misspell the Word Genealogy (About.com)
- Geneology, the common misspelling of the word genealogy, can bring very interesting on-line rewards (Treasure Maps Genealogy)
- Frequently Misspelled Words (Writing Help Central) – after all, we don’t just use genealogy words as we research
- Spelling and Genealogy (Genealogyblog)
When you read Dick
Eastman’s post, did another often-misspelled word come to mind? What word do you often misspell? Has it led to some neat finds that proper
spelling might have overlooked?
Editor’s Note: It appears that the article was also
published previously by Dick, Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, August
17, 2010, http://www.eogn.com
Editor’s Note: Wordle was used to create the graphic
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Spelling is not the only problem. I never found John Doe until Family Search showed me John Doe Senior and John Doe Junior. I had not searched for Senior or Junior.
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