Kirk Mahoney . com

I got an interesting email message last Sunday from one of your fellow readers of this blog.

I will refer to him simply as “Ian” because I don’t have permission to use his surname.

Ian had read “Perogative” and wanted to share his own perspective from the United Kingdom.

When I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) for my original blog post, I got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “perogative” — spelled P-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,750,000 matches
• “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,610,000 matches

This told me that Web authors had favored the incorrect word over the correct word by a ratio of 1.02-to-1, which is horrible!

When Ian tries to access Google.com in the UK, Google auto-redirects him to Google.co.uk, where he got these statistics:

• “perogative” — spelled P-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 244,000 matches
• “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 4,000,000 matches

I could not exactly reproduce Ian’s results, but I searched at Google.co.uk and got nearly the same ratio that he did.

The 16.4-to-1 dominance of the correct spelling at Google.co.uk puzzles Ian and his fiancée, given that they agree that the incorrect pronunciation and spelling of “prerogative” is very common in the UK.