As I was documenting something as innoculous today, I thought I better double-check my spelling. Google works well as a spell-checker, either giving you a definition link or suggesting the correct spelling if it’s not a word. For once, Google was at a loss for words. It offered neither definition nor correction but just links to 590 pages using the word. 590 links is a pretty good sign a word is misspelled, and badly misspelled at that; by comparison, incredable gets over 150,000 hits (and a suggestion with the correct spelling).
Next I tried the dictionary widget that comes with OS X 10.4. No luck there after trying several possible alternatives. Unlike a real dictionary, I was unable to browse for words that started with, say, inno which would help me out in case of any unsuspected silent letters. Noticing the widget also had a thesaurus (32,000 Google hits for thesauras), I looked up synonyms for harmless and immediately found innocuous. Of course!
Later I tried my email app’s spell-checker on innoculous and it did figure out what I meant.
Try dictionary.com aka reference.com http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=innoculous has the right suggestion. As well as thesaurus.
thanks for this entry it helped me find the spelling of innocuous. Ironically it is now the first listing when you google innoculous.
[...] http://www.forthgo.com/blog/2005/11/28/innoculous-misspelling/ [...]
wow. great job. you have probably saved hundreds of college term papers. and yes, i found this by misspelling the word.