Spelling Checked

Red-faced spellcheck firm corrects own spelling

TORONTO (Reuters) - A company that sells software to correct irritating Internet spelling mistakes has reissued its latest news release to correct a minor snafu.

TextTrust, which says it focuses on "eliminating the negative text impressions on Web sites," re-released a Tuesday news release to correct a mistake that listed the most common spelling errors on "the 16 million we (sic) pages it has spell checked over the past year."

It said commonly misspelled words included independent, accommodation and definitely, which were spelled independant, accomodation and definately.

"It's very embarrassing," said Pat Brink, PR consultant for the Toronto-based company. "I made the mistake, not TextTrust -- they do a much better job, It's certainly egg on the face of this public relations person."

The release quoted TextTrust as saying that it used both human editors and special spell-checking software to scour Web sites for spelling mistakes. "TextTrust wants to make sure that organizations never again receive the 'I found a spelling error on your web site' e-mail," it said.