My wife saw this on a banner in a grocery store years ago, and I have seen this increasingly often over the years.

Problem:
There is no such (properly spelled) word.

Explanation:
When my wife told a manager in the grocery store that the word on the banner was misspelled and even showed him where it was misspelled, the manager insisted, “No, it isn’t!”

Also, the manager did not suggest to my wife that it was a play on words — as in “ConGRADulations, GRADUATES!”

Instead, the manager argued that this was a properly spelled word.

I believe that spelling “congratulations” as “congradulations” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

Because it’s simpler to say the ‘d’ in “congradulations” than to say the first ‘t’ in “congratulations”, many American English speakers mispronounce and hear it this way and subsequently believe that the ‘d’ belongs where the ‘t’ should go.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “congratulations” — 74,300,000 matches
• “congradulations” — 1,360,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors favor “congratulations” over “congradulations” by a ratio of 54.6:1 — good, but not great, especially given the more than one million matches for the misspelled word, and even assuming that some of the instances of “congradulations” were a play on words.

Solution:
“Congratulations!”