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Comment by leetcrew | Hacker News Reader

sorry for the total aside, but this article reminded me of one of my deepest typo curiosities: why is the misspelling ratio -> ration so common? there are lots of words that can have a character erroneously appended and still be a correctly spelled (different) word. for example: most verbs in english (ride -> rides, bake -> baked, etc.). but for some reason, I see ratio -> ration all the time. 'n' isn't even that close to 'o' on the keyboard! it really jumps out when you subvocalize; the 'n' changes the pronunciation a lot.

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Not sure if it would be this, but autocomplete on some platforms sometimes happily replaces a correctly spelled word with a different word it incorrectly assumes makes more sense contextually, and you won’t notice it happened unless you’re paying close attention as you type.

Wish this wasn’t so abusive to the user at times.

You can sometimes make it less aggressive. I turn off autocomplete completely because my phone has a hardware keyboard, but I set it to medium for the software keyboard (in landscape mode or if I bring it up manually).

I wonder if it has to do with the suffix -tion. Maybe muscle memory is triggered when the letters “tio” are typed at the end of the word and “n” is automatically added to the end of the word.

I suspect this. Also note that spell checking won't detect it; you won't get a helpful red underline to warn you.

I'm fairly sure this is why I do it. I'm an average typist and above-average speller, but -ion spills out whenever I type it. There are almost no words ending in -io, and there are a lot ending in -ion. For some quick numbers, the OSPD database I have here has 1432 -ion words and only 47 -io words.

I always type ratio as ration but never type radio as radion.

I do this all the time. When I was young I believe a saw a ratio-n typo in a math textbook, and for many years I believed that it was a synonym. Like a fraction, but a ration. Combine this with the -tion problem that others have mentioned and it definitely rolls off the fingers quite easily.

Maybe when they go to tap the space bar they end up clipping the 'n', just a guess.

The one I see all the time is defiantly in place of definitely.

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