Online Grammar Errors Have Increased by 148% in Nine Years
The team at Knowingly has created the Correctica tool to scan websites for errors that spell checkers, grammar checkers, and human editors often miss. These errors include the misuse of idioms, incorrect articles, and commonly confused words or homophones.
Through the development of the Correctica tool, we’ve become all too familiar with the use of poor grammar online and started to wonder, is online grammar getting worse?*
On January 16th, we evaluated the frequency with which several commonly misused phrases appear online. We compared that to online content data obtained in 2006. In 2006 Google released a count of all of the 1grams to 5grams on the web—a 1gram is a word, like banana, a 2gram is two words together, like yellow banana, and so on.
This resource, which contained the analysis of the trillion words that made up the web back in 2006, has been a treasure trove for researchers due to its immense size and completeness. It also serves as a frozen point in time for seeing how the web has changed.
We were interested to see if Internet users’ grammar has gotten better, worse, or stayed the same. We compared the Google Ngram data from 2006 to search result data today. To do this, we chose a selection of homophones which are often mistaken for one another. A homonym is a pair or set of words which have the same spelling or pronunciation but mean different things, such as two, too, and to. We performed a Google search for the incorrect and correct versions of each phrase within quotation marks and recorded the corresponding number of search results.
The phrases we examined along with their search numbers then and now are listed below:
| Country | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Correct Term |
Then |
Now |
Incorrect Term |
Then |
Now |
|
jugular vein |
56,409 |
794,000 |
juggler vein |
693 |
4,150 |
|
bear in mind |
931,235 |
35,500,000 |
bare in mind |
18,492 |
477,000 |
|
head over heels |
179,491 |
8,130,000 |
head over heals |
12,633 |
398,000 |
|
chocolate mousse |
237,870 |
6,790,000 |
chocolate moose |
14,504 |
364,000 |
|
egg yolk |
152,458 |
5,420,000 |
egg yoke |
2,028 |
88,900 |
|
without further ado |
120,124 |
1,960,000 |
without further adieu |
13,170 |
437,000 |
|
whet your appetite |
52,850 |
533,000 |
wet your appetite |
8,930 |
216,000 |
|
heroin and morphine |
3,220 |
112,000 |
heroine and morphine |
45 |
3,860 |
|
reach across the aisle |
2707 |
117,000 |
reach across the isle |
93 |
11,800 |
|
herd mentality |
19,444 |
411,000 |
heard mentality |
313 |
21,300 |
|
weather vane |
70906 |
477,000 |
weather vein |
698 |
16,100 |
|
zombie horde |
21,091 |
464,000 |
zombie hoard |
744 |
64,200 |
|
chili peppers |
1,105,405 |
29,100,000 |
chilly peppers |
2,532 |
155,000 |
|
brake pedal |
138,765 |
1,450,000 |
brake petal |
417 |
27,800 |
|
pique your interest |
8,126 |
296,000 |
peek your interest |
320 |
111,000 |
|
lessen the burden |
14,926 |
389,000 |
lesson the burden |
212 |
91,400 |
|
bridal shower |
852,371 |
16,500,000 |
bridle shower |
182 |
157,000 |
Overall, we found that the quality of Internet grammar has worsened. On average, in 2006 the above 17 examples were written incorrectly 3.4% of the time they appeared online. By 2015, that had increased to an average of 8.4%. That’s a 148.2% increase in the average number of times that these incorrect phrases appeared online from 2006 to 2015.
Not every example within our sample set showed a worsening of bad grammar, some numbers decreased. Today, web writers are 57.2% less likely to write juggler vein than they were 9 years ago. However, writers muse of an attack by a zombie hoard 256.7% more now than they did in 2006.
Another interesting result of the research is the general increase in web content from 2006 to 2015. The correct term reach across the aisle was used online just 2,707 times in 2006, compared to 117,000 times in 2015, an increase of 43 times in nine years. There was a 45x increase in the number of times head over heels appears today versus in 2006.
To arrive at our numbers, we added together both the correct and incorrect usage of each set of terms both for 2006 and again for 2015. We then divided the number of incorrect uses by the total number of uses for each era. This gave us the percentage of times a term was misused in 2006 and again in 2015.
X=Incorrect Phrase 2006/(Correct Phrase + Incorrect Phrase)
Y= Incorrect Phrase 2015/(Correct Phrase + Incorrect Phrase)
In the case of peek your interest the numbers would be X=3.8% and Y=27.3%, indicating that the instances of this phrase being misused has increased 619.8% over nine years.
| Country | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Incorrect Term |
Then |
Now |
Increase |
|
|
juggler vein |
1.2% |
0.5% |
-57.2% |
|
|
bare in mind |
1.9% |
1.3% |
-31.9% |
|
|
head over heals |
6.6% |
4.7% |
-29.0% |
|
|
chocolate moose |
5.7% |
5.1% |
-11.5% |
|
|
egg yoke |
1.3% |
1.6% |
22.9% |
|
|
without further adieu |
9.9% |
18.2% |
84.5% |
|
|
wet your appetite |
14.5% |
28.8% |
99.5% |
|
|
heroine and morphine |
1.4% |
3.3% |
141.7% |
|
|
reach across the isle |
3.3% |
9.2% |
175.8% |
|
|
heard mentality |
1.6% |
4.9% |
211.0% |
|
|
weather vein |
1.0% |
3.3% |
234.9% |
|
|
zombie hoard |
3.4% |
12.2% |
256.7% |
|
|
chilly peppers |
0.2% |
0.5% |
131.8% |
|
|
brake petal |
0.3% |
1.9% |
527.9% |
|
|
peek your interest |
3.8% |
27.3% |
619.8% |
|
|
lesson the burden |
1.4% |
19.0% |
1258.6% |
|
|
bridle shower |
0.0% |
0.9% |
4315.2% |
|
|
3.4% |
8.4% |
148.2% |
Correctica scans websites looking for errors that spell checkers and grammar checkers miss. Try it at Correctica.com. Also at Correctica.com is “Proof it Free” a free tool for checking blog posts, term papers, resumes… anything.
#These are actually examples of usage, but many people think of them as grammar errors.