I’ve noted a fair number of threads here lately, using the term alchohol to describe the intoxicating substance ethanol, more commonly known as alcohol. I’ve seen this spelling repeated in the same post, indicating it was no mere typo.
Going to Google, I find 1.12 million hits for alchohol, including many bona fide websites devoted to disseminating information about alcohol and alcohol abuse. (Alcohol has 139 million google hits.)
Here at our SDMB, I find 474 threads containing this spelling, while uncovering 750 threads using the word alcohol".
My online dictionary does not recognize the term alchohol.
Is there some sub-population where this is the accepted spelling? The CHO part of it is a generally recognized reference to hydrated carbon.
I imagine it has something to do with knowing that there’s an h somewhere in there, maybe more than one, and that ch is sometimes pronounced as a hard c sound, as in choral.
Phonetics isn’t always the safest bet for spelling in English.
I think it is simply because “ch” is such a common combination in English. “Alcohol” being derived from Arabic does not have the form of a normal English word. Therefore the tendency is to make it “look” more English by putting the “h” next to the “c.” I don’t think it has anything to do with chemistry.
The same thing happens in my last name, which is of German derivation. It ends in “hr”, which is ananthema to English speakers. Instead people misspell it by putting the “h” next to a “g” to make the nice English combination “gh”.
Such misspellings happen in Spanish too: people rearrange the spelling of foreign names so they make more sense in that language. For example, Spanish speakers often misspell “John” as “Jhon”. While neither “hn” or “jh” are normal combinations in Spanish, the latter is somewhat less weird because many words end in “on.”
I don’t know, but I bet I was at least one of the results of your search. It’s just a brain fart, like how I always want sentence to have an a in it, or amount to have two m’s. Things have gotten much better with my posts since Firefox integrated the spellcheck, lemme tell you.
Words that are “odd” are commonly mispelled. Like misspelled, for instance. And “h” is a letter that suffers a lot of shuffling. So we have things like Ghandi and Gandhi and Ghandhi, and heck, maybe even Ganhdi. People know there’s a “h” somewhere, but aren’t exactly sure where or how many.
That’s me right there. I invariably have to type out alcohol at least twice before I hit the right spelling. I know there is an H in there somewhere, but for whatever reason put it in the wrong spot the first time through.
It should be pointed out that we would not have the word “alcohol” in our vocabulary if not for the toil of medieval alchemists. It first referred to any sublimed substance or spirit, and ethanol (aqua vita) just happened to be the single most common solvent used.
The “al-” prefix in both “alcohol” and “alchemy” is borrowed from the arabic definite article. The words are just transliterated inconsistently.
It’s perfectly natural that many people should revert to the much more familiar form of “alchemy.”
I am one of those who tends to spell it with a “ch”, and I don’t know why, and generally I’m a good speller. Somehow it just looks better with a “ch”. How many words have a “coho” string in them? It looks strange that way, like Esperanto or something, although I know it’s correct.
And then there are those of us folks who are spelling impaired Back when I was in school I was an excellent speller. In my early professional career, before word processing programs, I was still pretty accurate. Once I discovered the spell check feature, and 98% of my work is done on a computer, my brain instantly went into “we can dump this spelling database” mode and decided to dedicate the newly freed space to contemplation of the wonders of belly button lint
It makes no difference how often I wish the spelling database could be re-loaded … that memory bank has been erased!
and odds are, because this is a spelling thread, I will make a lot of errors!
Before anyone starts using these figures to claim something ludicrous like “OMG!! 38.725% of dopers don’t know how to spell alcohalchohaholol!!”, they should consider these points:
[ul]
[li]A single thread can only appear once in a search. So if “alcohol” is mentioned several billion times in a thread, but “alchohol” appears just once, that thread only counts as one hit for each search.[/li][li]750 seems to be the maximum number of threads returned in a single search. If you do these searches now, you’ll find 475 threads with “alchohol” (now including this one), but still only 750 “alcohol” threads.[/li][/ul]
This time I’ll resist the urge to greet a gemstone…
I’m one of the ones that at least used to (knock on wood) spell it that way all the time. I am a chemist so eventually I think this got drilled out of me. On the other hand, I am spelling impaired and if corrected I would most likely raise my middle finger at you. Science is for me, english is for you other people.
Back when I was in school I was an excellent speller. In my early professional career, before word processing programs, I was still pretty accurate. Once I discovered the spell check feature, and 98% of my work is done on a computer, my brain instantly went into “we can dump this spelling database” mode and decided to dedicate the newly freed space to contemplation of the wonders of belly button lint 