I saw this yesterday on a website.

Problem:
One of the words is misspelled.

Explanation:
I had just registered my name and address at a website where I wanted to make a purchase.

The website permits purchases by returning members, by new members, and by those who choose not to create a member account.

I chose to create a member account so that I could track my order.

An account-creation confirmation page appeared, apparently to allay my concerns about creating yet another identity (“member account”) at yet another website.

The Web page referred to “member priviledges”, with the second word spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E-S.

The misspelling was obvious to me, if not to the page’s author. The second word should have been spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E-S (with no “d” in the middle).

This misspelling is a common English blunder, but I wondered just how common it was.

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:

• “privilege” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E — 31,400,000 matches
• “privileged” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E-D — 16,900,000 matches
• “privileges” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E-S — 21,100,000 matches
• “priviledge” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E — 694,000 matches
• “priviledged” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E-D — 354,000 matches
• “priviledges” — spelled P-R-I-V-I-L-E-D-G-E-S — 362,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spellings versus the incorrect spellings by a ratio of 49.2-to-1, which is good but not excellent, especially in light of the more than 1.4 million total misspellings.

I suspect that these misspellings come from mental interference by the word “ledge” — spelled L-E-D-G-E.

Solution:
“member privileges”