Kevin Jones, who runs the website, said he had thought there may have been around 30 misspellings in a year but was "astounded" when he found so many. Mr Jones said he was amazed that all the people who wrote the name wrongly into a search engine had got to the website. "Some of the names were unrecognisable," he said.
"But my criteria for counting the misspellings was that at least three people would have spelt it that way - and that they had viewed pages on the website after using them. I think we must be the most misspelt place names in the UK - I challenge people to let me know if we're not."
Eileen Burtonwood, chair of the Betws-y-Coed and district tourism association, said: "I couldn't believe how many different versions there were, quite honestly. I would have guessed there would be 50 or 60, but not 364. The staggering thing is that when we totalled them up, we only counted versions which had been used by at least three different people." She joined Mr Jones in throwing down a challenge to other towns and villages in the UK to see if there's anywhere else where the name has been spelled so many different ways.
You can see the full list of misspellings here.
1 comment:
It's not just Wales the English have all sorts of problems with English place names, usually due to the unusual local pronunciation of those names. Often these names are Anglo-Saxon or Viking so I suppose they are not strictly English place names.
If people have never seen a place name written down they assume a phonetic spelling. People searching for the famous plague village of Eyam have been known to search for Eem. And the Yorkshire town of Slaithwaite is often spelled Slawit. And there are many more.
And of course there are those places such as Worcester that most people know aren't spelled phonetically, but aren't sure how they are really spelled so people just take a stab.
Funnily enough though I've never had any trouble with Betws-y-coed.
Post a Comment