Misspelt

According to the article in the NY Times (free registration required), misspellings on eBay can provide a lucrative source for deals:

Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless — and sometimes just careless — sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires.
Some experts say there is no evidence that people are spelling worse than they ever did. But with the growth of e-mail correspondence and instant messaging, language has grown more informal. And much as calculators did for arithmetic, spell checkers have made good spelling seem to quite a number of people like an obsolete virtue.

Here's what I collected at the time I wrote this:

Singles

404 items found for silvr
115 items found for Pheonix
66 items found for patroits
37 items found for Harly
27 items found for platinium
27 items found for Nintedo
15 items found for Pokimon
10 items found for valntine
7 items found for Monica Lewinski
6 items found for Arnold Schwarzeneger

By comparison, there's only a single hit for "silvr" on Yahoo! Auctions and none for "Pokimon."
Doubles

Bret (66) Farve (320)
tifany (16) or tiffiny (14)
Sadam (33) Hussien (6)
Rene (23) Zellwegger (15)

For some reason, these misspellings also turned out to be a rich source for Mozilla Firebird 0.7 freeze ups or crashes on Windows 2000. These problems seemed to be reproducible (I tried "niky" about five times for instance), seemed to be associated with the more outlandish spellings, and did not occur under IE6.

Originally published: 2004/01/30 18:32:18

Frabjous Times

Misspelt