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Thirteen out of 20 top universities misspell ‘university’ on website

Matilda Battersby
Tuesday 07 July 2009 15:10 BST
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Cambridge, Harvard and Yale are among the top universities found to have embarrassing spelling mistakes on their websites.

Thirteen out of 20 world class university websites analysed by Australian spelling software Spellr.us were found to have miss-spellings of the word ‘university’.

A staggering 14 per cent of university web pages contain at least one genuine spelling error, the survey found, with some of the most prestigious American universities among the worst offenders:

Harvard spelled ‘professor’ wrong on one of its menus and Yale’s website describes the “Universtiy’s ever-expanding international strength.”

Despite representing one of the UK’s oldest and best educational institutions Cambridge’s website was found to have miss-spelled the word ‘service’ in one of its navigational bars.

Spellr.us says the results could have been worse:

“We had our software examine only the first 1000 pages of each site. As most universities contain more than 1000 pages it is safe to assume the results would have been even worse if we’d analysed every page on the site,” said general manager Kevin Garber.

The ten most commonly miss-spelled words were: Accommodation, technology, university, harassment, research, administration, financial, information, association and millennium.

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