“You are wright, Edward.”

Adjectives, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a comment on someone’s blog.

Problem:
The commenter used a noun where an adjective was required.

Explanation:
The comment appeared below a blog post about three places to shop for Google Android applications.

The commenter wrote “You are wright, Edward.” and was indicating agreement with what another commenter — named Edward — had written.

The word “wright” — spelled W-R-I-G-H-T — is a noun that means someone who repairs or constructs something. For example, a “playwright” is someone who constructs theatrical plays.

The commenter should have used the adjective “right” — spelled R-I-G-H-T — which has many definitions, one of which is correct in opinion.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “you are right” — using R-I-G-H-T — 6,500,000 matches
  • “you are wright” — using W-R-I-G-H-T — 4,320 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 1,505-to-1, which is superb.

Solution:
“You are right, Edward.”