‘Excgarated’: Reddit User’s Misspelling of Exaggerated Goes Viral, Proves There Is A First Time For Everything

Apparently no one ever misspelled exaggerated as “excgarated” until one Reddit user did it on Sunday. After another Reddit user discovered, when searching for the misspelling, that the comment from the Reddit thread was the only citation that appeared in Google, “excgarated” went viral.

Theoman333 is credited with being the first person to misspell “exaggerated” as “excgarated.” In response to a question, the Reddit user wrote, “Because its excgarated, there's a cult like mentality.” A common misspelling tends to drop the second “g” but this typo gave even search engines problems. Another Reddit user, feylias, realized the unique nature of theoman333's mistake, saying, "excgarated. Google this and your comment is the only thing that comes up."

Since the news of the misspelling spread, there are now multiple search results for “excgarated” on Google, while Bing and Yahoo recognize it as a typo of “exaggerated” although the search engines include results for "excavated."

Following the news that his misspelling went viral, theoman333 updated his response to explain how the typo occurred. “I'm really surprised from the reactions to a strange spelling mistake. You people are entertained easily. Truth is, auto correct and computers ruined my sense of spelling completely,” wrote theoman333. Once he realized the error he did not bother to correct it and the rest is Internet history.

Luckily for theoman333, history is full of poor spellers. F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of “The Great Gatsby,” was well known for his spelling mistakes. Literary critic Edmund Wilson said, “’This Side of Paradise’ is one of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.” Luckily for theoman33 his spelling error was nowhere near as notorious as Dan Quayle’s misspelling of potato in 1992.