Several years ago, I stopped using a dictionary to look up spellings of words when I was typing in an app without a built-in spell checker. It was simpler to just type the term into Google. If I couldn't decided between two variations, I'd type both in: the one with the most hits wins. (Hey, language is a fluid, slightly conventionalized system; democracy of use always wins in the long run.)
The website Languages of the real and artificial posts a visualization of the various spellings of "aargh" (with different numbers of repeated internal letters, based on Google searches of a range of variations:
What got me thinking about this again, was, of all things, thinking about how to spell “aargh!” One ‘a’, two, three…? And how many ‘r’s?
This is an interesting problem, first, because so many repetition counts are attested. There’s not just “mispelling” (1s) and “misspelling” (2s), but “argh”, “aargh”, “aaargh”, etc. And second, because the space is two-dimensional: not just “argh”, “aargh”, “aaargh”, ..., but also “argh”, “arrgh”, “arrrgh”, ... — and the product, with “aarrgh”, “aaarrrgh”, etc.
It’s clear that a wide range of spellings are acceptable. What’s the most common?
Without further ado, I created this page to help me find the answer.
(The resulting visualization is a table, with "ARGH" in the upper-left corner and, well, the same word with a whole slew of A's and R's in the lower-right corner. Variations fill out the rest of it. "Islands" of popularity are indicated in red.
[via information aesthetics]
Posted by johndanseven at January 6, 2006 12:35 PM