The spell checker is a truly wonderful thing, but I find that it has made people (me included) a little lazy. This is most noticeable when it comes to things that I read online and, because I’m a geek like this, when I analyze the logs for the OfficialAres.com website.

Thousands of people get to the website every day looking for information on Ares (or Aeres, or Aers, as some people like to call it), and I’m always seeing varying permutations of the spelling for the word (presumably as people rush to type it into Google or a similar search engine). Until there is a speel checker integrated into Google, I suspect that all websites will see people’s misspellings going to their or to other peoples’ websites.

Sometimes it’s just a case of letters being closer together on a keyboard, meaning you hit one rather than the other: Arez and Areas are good examples of this. Sometimes we get ‘real’ words that people’s fingers are obviously typing without their owners really thinking about it: Aries and Aires are two examples.

Sometimes we get spellings that are so obviously wrong that we have to assume that people simply don’t have any idea of how the word is spelt – Aris is an example of this – and these could be visitors whose first language is not English.