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How not to spell
2007-05-08 09:58:44
Ack, it's been a long time since I blogged. Anyway, every week or so we review the top searches on our site, and I thought I'd share with you, my loyal cult following of two or three readers (depending whether my mom is reading this week or not), some of the fun things that we've found.
Spider-Man not SpidermanPoor Spider-Man. When it comes to finding our most popular character on the web, Peter Parker has it rough on a number of fronts. First, everyone misspells Spider-Man. It's tough...most people don't immediately think "Capital-S Spider Dash Capital M Man" when they hear Spider-Man, they think "spiderman", which is how most people type the name when they want to search for it. Aside from obvious typos like "Spinderman" or "Spidderman" (which sounds like a dentist I used to go to) and a few deliberate cutesy misspellings (was Spyderman ever a real character here?), Spiderman is the most common misspelling we get...and is always in the top 5 searches for our site.
But even if you spell Spider-Man correctly he's hard to find. I mean, I don't think that Stan Lee had sophisticated search engine optimization techniques in mind when he was busy inventing the everyman super-hero, he couldn't have spelled it in a worse way when it comes to the internet. First, a lot of search engines interpret Spider-Man as "find articles with the word 'spider' but not the word 'man'." And then even a lot of search engines think you actually mean (wait for it) Spiderman. Even the computers are confused.
Anyway, it's Spider-Man, not Spiderman.
DashesWhile we're on the subject, dashes are tricky. The rough rule seems to be that characters with animal names get them in the form of Animalname-Man: Ant-Man, Spider-Man, Giant-Man (giant being an animal for our purposes) etc. This holds true for the various Animal-Woman characters as well: Spider-Girl, Spider-Woman. Gorilla Man seems to be the exception that proves the rule. Other "man" names don't get dashes: Iron Man, Machine Man, Wonder Man. So animals get dashes, minerals don't. Not sure about plants, but I will check with Tom.
Why are you here again?Every week a certain number of searches in our top 20 are for characters that belong to other companies. And we're happy to have the traffic.
The king of the misspellingsAfter Spidey, the clear winner for the most misspelled character is Juggernaut. It's a tough word (I just had to look it up to make sure I got it right), and I'm not blaming anyone. But still. Here's a few of my favorites:
- jugernote
- juggernauth
- juggernatr
- juggrunat
- juggernautt
- juggrunat
- and finally Jaggernuat, which sounds like something I had too much of once at a party in college
Anyway, until next time, happy searching. And remember. Spider-Man. Not Spiderman.
I seem to recall reading that Stan Lee put the dash in there to make Spider-Man stand out. So that when you glanced at it, it wouldn't look like Superman at all.
eing such a big Spider-Man fan, seeing people forget the hyphen is a big pet peeve of mine.
Posted by IanZL on 2007-02-08 22:16:19
WHAT!!
Ok how can people not spell Juggernaut, it really isn't that hard + Spider-Man is a huge hero and if you can't spell his name right then you aren't a real fan of his!
Posted by TravisFrost on 2007-03-11 21:49:37
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Peter Olson is the senior web architect for Marvel Entertainment. His hair does kind of look like that. |
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