We all have words we struggle to spell, and for many of us, one of them is “restaurant.”
That’s according to Google search data compiled by the wordsmiths at unscrambled words, who found we’re double-checking that French import some 95,000 times per month.
Restaurant easily outpaces the next most-searched word, “pneumonia,” followed by “appreciate,” “receipt” and “beautiful” to round out the top five.
A spokesperson for unscrambled words noted, “One thing that stands out from the top 10 is the number of loan words or words with non-English origins. It’s no coincidence that English speakers are tripped up with some of these words, especially when the spelling patterns present in these words may not have many examples in the rest of English.”
Examples? “Pneumonia” has Greek origins, while “bougie,” which is also the name of a medical device, originates in France, despite its wide use now in disparaging American slang to mean fancy.
The website has little tricks to remember some of these. For example, for the #7 entry, “maintenance,” the site suggests saying “maintenance is in the main ten things you should do to keep things working well.”
But let’s face it, you’re likely gonna check Google.
Here are the top ten most-searched words and the number of online searches for each per month in the U.S., according to unscrambled words:
1. Restaurant — 95,000 searches
2. Pneumonia — 13,000
3. Appreciate — 11,000
4. Receipt — 9,700
5. Beautiful — 9,400
6. Niece — 9,200
7. Maintenance — 8,500
8. Bougie — 8,300
9. Diarrhea — 8,200
10. Congratulations — 7,100