“Readyness to travel”

Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a job announcement from IBM.

Problem:
“Readyness” — with the letter Y in the middle — is a misspelled noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in “ready” must be changed to “i” when the suffix N-E-S-S is appended to a word such as “ready”.

I suppose that the hiring standards or quality control at IBM are suffering.

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

  • “readiness” — with the letter I in the middle — 17,700,000 matches
  • “readyness” — with the letter Y in the middle — 81,800 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 216-to-1, which is excellent.

Solution:
“Readiness to travel”