Colorado’s most misspelled word in 2026 is really embarrassing

A 14-year-old from California just rattled off 32 words in 90 seconds — including “bromocriptine,” “taurokathapsia” and “cywyddau” — to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Meanwhile, a new study says the word Coloradans struggle with most is “color.”

That’s C-O-L-O-R. Five letters. The word in the state’s name.

Shrey Parikh of Rancho Cucamonga, California, was crowned the 2026 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion on Thursday after besting runner-up Ishaan Gupta of Jersey City, New Jersey, in a record-breaking spell-off at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. Parikh correctly spelled 32 words in the 90-second lightning round — a new record — to take home $52,500, the Scripps Cup and the title of 111th champion in the competition’s 98-year history. His official winning word, “bromocriptine,” is defined as a polypeptide alkaloid that is a derivative of ergot and mimics the activity of dopamine.

While Parikh was conquering pharmacological vocabulary on a national stage, the website Unscramblerer.com was quietly humbling the rest of us. The site analyzed Google Trends search data from Jan. 1 to May 18 — looking at queries like “how do you spell” and “how to spell” — to determine the most commonly misspelled word in each state. Nationally, “bougie” topped the list with 134,400 searches, followed by “favorite” (128,400), “through” (127,200), “business” (123,600) and “tomorrow” (121,200).

Colorado’s most-searched word? “Color.” It was also the top result in Illinois, making it a two-state stumper. To be fair, it’s possible some searchers are confused about whether the British spelling — “colour” — is correct in the U.S. But still: It’s in our flag, our license plate, the name of our state and about half the tourism marketing you see on I-70. Neighboring states didn’t fare much better. Wyoming’s most misspelled word was “chihuahua,” New Mexico’s was “sincerely” and Utah’s was “basically.”

Some of the more eyebrow-raising state results nationwide: Florida can’t spell “school,” Nevada struggles with “teacher,” North Dakota is tripped up by “adios” and Michigan is stuck on “which.” The Unscramblerer.com study attributed the difficulty to silent letters, irregular vowel sounds, tricky suffixes and — perhaps most tellingly — the growing reliance on autocorrect and AI tools that may be eroding spelling skills over time.