This Chart of 9th Graders Misspelling One Word Will Make You Question Everything

Stare at a word long enough, and it's going to start staring back at you funny. Before long, it'll look misspelled, misplaced, misconstrued, and you'll check it in your trusty, dog-eared copy of The Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Revised Edition (2004), and find that -- yes -- you are going crazy and "camouflage" actually is spelled just like that.

That's one lesson to take from r/dataisbeautiful's chart on the ways to spell the word everyone normally abbreviates to "camo" (which most students got right). This data came from a 52-student biology class that turned in varying spellings of the word of Italian and French origin in their lab write-ups. It was first turned into a pie chart by the Redditor Iheartdna, then into this flowing Sankey diagram by fellow user Flashman.

For those who don't know, Sankey diagrams break down differences by their decision points. In other words, because a chart like this illuminates every different permutation of the spelling of camouflage, and might help trace the students' train of thought as the tripped up in the spelling. As Flashman wrote in a separate comment, "As you can see, most students opted for 'Cam', but then the majority decided on 'of' instead of 'ouf'. We can see that 7 students recovered from this mistake to end with 'lage', but another 5 made a subsequent mistake in 'lague'." If you're interested in etymology and the brain process of how we form words, the conversation is worth the read.

For everyone else, we can't deny what another Redditor joked: "I've read this word so many goddamn times in so many goddamn ways that I'm pretty sure I'll never be able to spell it correctly again."

Spelling's hard.

h/t r/dataisbeautiful

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Eric Vilas-Boas is a writer and editor at Thrillist. Follow him @e_vb_.