Top 10 Ukulele (Mis)Spellings

Because it’s a Hawaiian word, the word “ukulele” is frequently misspelled by English speakers.

Ever wonder what the top 10 most popular ways people spell (or misspell) it are? So did I. Here’s what I did about it:

First I broke the word down into its 4 syllables, “yoo”, “koo”, “lay” and “lee”, then I tried to come up with all the possible ways someone would try to spell each syllable. I came up with:

Yoo – u, yu, yoo, oo

Koo – ku, ke, ka, ki, koo

Lay – le, lai, lay, la, lei, lie

Lee – le, li, lie, ly, lee, lay, lai, lei

Then I made a list of every combination of the word using these different spellings to come up with a list of 920 possible spellings (See that list below).

Then I used a tool to see how often each one was searched, and found the top 10 most popular, here’s the result:

1. Ukulele (the normal spelling)
2. Ukelele (an alternate spelling mainly used in the early 1900’s)
3. Ukalali
4. Ukelale
5. Ukalele
6. Ukalaylee
7. Ukalaily
8. Yukulele
9. Yukalele
10. Ukilayli

What can we learn from this? Not much, but it is interesting that the “oo” spellings were not on the popular list, considering that is the true Hawaiian pronunciation.

This is likely explained by the fact that there are more English speakers than Hawaiian speakers, and that Hawaiian speakers are probably more familiar with the spelling (and therefore do not misspell it as frequently).

Anyways, here’s the list of all 920 combinations that were checked:

Pointless? Probably, but we can’t just sit around strumming chords all day.

Don’t forget to tune up your strings. Happy Playing!