Oh, the incredible IRONY of it all!
I was just trying to look up a word, and I went to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary site.
I am trying to decide whether to laugh in derision or to cry. Help me out, here, people.
The URL is misspelled. Merriam-Webster's website MISSPELLED its own name!
AAAAAAAAUUUUGGH!
Gawdhelpus!
posted by "Ms. Cornelius" @ 6:21 PM
4 Comments:
Believe it or not, they do that on purpose. It's so that people who can't spell can put in the URL correctly and still get to m-w.com (which is what I usually type in.)
For example, go to www.mytimes.com. It'll take you to the same place as www.nytimes.com. A few sites do this.
It's also so that some seedy/shady website doesn't capitalize on a simple mistype and associate itself with the real website. Along the lines of the whitehouse.com fiasco...
Still, these reasons aren't enough to make us NOT cringe. Why couldn't they do something like Google, where, if we misspell something, a handy little "did you mean THIS?" message comes up?
I think it reinforces bad spelling, and actually teaches people to spell incorrectly. And that is hardly what one expects from an online dictionary.
And I got there from a google search, not from misspelling the site name.
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