In Online Auctions, Misspelling in Ads Often Spells Cash

January 28, 2004

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

When Holly Marshall wanted to sell a pair of dangling

earrings, a popular style these days, she listed them on

eBay once, and got no takers. She tried a second time, and

still no interest.

Was it the price? The fuzzy picture? Maybe the description:

a beautiful pair of chandaleer earrings.

Such is the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the

clueless - and sometimes just careless - sell labtop

computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras,

comferters and saphires.

They do get bidders, but rarely very many. Often the buyers

are those who troll for spelling slip-ups, buying items on

the cheap and selling them all over again on eBay, but with

the right spelling and for the right price. John H. Green,

a jeweler in Central Florida, is one of them.

Mr. Green once bought a box of gers for $2. They were gears

for pocket watches, which he cleaned up and put back on the

auction block with the right spelling. They sold for $200.

"I've bought and sold stuff on eBay and Yahoo that I bought

for next to nothing" because of poor spelling or vague

descriptions, he said.

David Scroggins, who lives in Milwaukee, also searches for

misspellings. His company provides entertainment for

weddings and corporate events, and microphone systems for

shows at Wisconsin's casinos. He has bought Hubbell

electrical cords for a 10th of their usual cost by

searching for Hubell and Hubbel. And he now operates his

entire business by laptop computers, having bought three

Compaqs for a pittance simply by asking for Compacts

instead.

No one knows how much misspelling is out there in eBay

land, where more than $23 billion worth of goods was sold

last year. The company does flag common misspellings, but

wrong spellings can also turn up similar misspellings, so

that buyers and sellers frequently read past the Web site's

slightly bashful line asking, by any chance, "Did you mean

. . . chandelier?"

One unofficial survey - an hour's search for creative

spellings - turned up dozens of items, including bycicles,

telefones, dimonds, mother of perl, cuttlery, bedroom suits

and loads of antiks.

Contacted, the sellers were often surprised to hear that

they had misspelled their wares.

Ms. Marshall, who lives in Dallas, said she knew she was on

shaky ground when she set out to spell chandelier. But

instead of flipping through a dictionary, she did an

Internet search for chandaleer and came up with 85 or so

listings.

She never guessed, she said, that results like that meant

she was groping in the spelling wilderness. Chandelier,

spelled right, turns up 715,000 times.

Some experts say there is no evidence that people are

spelling worse than they ever did. But with the growth of

e-mail correspondence and instant messaging, language has

grown more informal. And much as calculators did for

arithmetic, spell checkers have made good spelling seem to

quite a number of people like an obsolete virtue.

Not that spell checkers are used by nearly everyone.

Indeed, experts say the Internet - with its discussion

boards, blogs and self-published articles - is a treasure

trove of bad spelling.

"Before the Internet came along, poor spelling by the

public was by and large not exposed," said Paige P. Kimble,

the director of the National Spelling Bee. Now, though, "we

are becoming acutely aware of what a challenge spelling is

for us."

Sandra Wilde, author of the 1992 book "You Kan Red This!:

Spelling and Punctuation for Whole Language Classrooms

K-6," said language served a variety of purposes, so that

in some settings it might make sense to skip punctuation or

to speak in slang. She likens instant messaging, for

example, to notes passed at the back of the classroom when

the teacher's back is turned: there is no premium on proper

spelling.

"On something like eBay though," she said, "it matters.'

Henry Gomez, vice president for corporate communications at

eBay, said the company did not generally hear from sellers

who misspell, and had no way of gauging how many sales

might have involved misspelled listings.

But some sellers clearly bear in mind the potential for

disaster when preparing their advertisements. Warren Lieu

of Houston, who was selling hunting and fishing knives on

eBay recently, covered all the bases: his listing

advertised every sort of alphabetic butchery, including

knifes and knive.

Mr. Lieu, a computer programmer, keeps a list of common

misspellings, including labtop for laptop and Cusinart for

Cuisinart.

His strategy of listing multiple spellings, he said, is

based on his experience as a buyer. "I'm a bad speller

myself," he said. So his mistakes in searching for items

led him to realize that he could buy up bargains.

"I'd go ahead and deliberately misspell it when I searched

for items," he said.

Jim Griffith, whose official title at eBay is dean of eBay

education, teaches 40 to 50 seminars a year around the

country. Although the auction house flags common

misspellings online, Mr. Griffith said, the most common

question he gets is, "When will eBay get a spell checker?"

His answer? "You go to a store called a bookstore, and you

buy something called a dictionary."

Even some who have made money off misspellings have felt

their bite.

When Mr. Scroggins, who has been helping his parents sell

off the contents of his father's jewelry and watch repair

store, recently listed "a huge lot of earings," it

attracted only three bids, and sold for just $5.50.

And then there was the time he sold the family's flatwear.

The New York Times, pages 1, 19