I saw this two days ago in an online forum.

Problem:
The phrase “likely hood” — with the letter Y and a space in the middle — is a misspelling of a noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in a word such as “likely” must be changed to “i” when the suffix H-O-O-D is appended to it.

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

• “likelihood” — with the letter I in the middle — 31,400,000 matches
• “likely hood” — with the letter Y and a space in the middle — 130,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the correct word vs. the incorrect phrase by a ratio of 242-to-1, which is excellent.

Still, the existence of some 130,000 Web pages with the phrase “likely hood” — with the Y and a space in the middle — is a bit depressing.

Solution:
“I know the likelihood of …”

I saw this in a software test-plan document.

Problem:
“Ready-ness” — with the letter Y followed by a hyphen in the middle — is a misspelled noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in “ready” must be changed to “i” when the suffix N-E-S-S is appended to a word such as “ready”.

Furthermore, no hyphen should appear in the word “readiness”.

Beyond these two problems, there was no need to capitalize “System” and “Ready-ness”.

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

• “readiness” — with the letter I in the middle — 17,700,000 matches
• “ready-ness” — with the letter Y and a hyphen in the middle — 1,130 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 15,664-to-1, which is superb.

Solution:
“… it’s reliant upon system readiness …”

I saw this in a job announcement from IBM.

Problem:
“Readyness” — with the letter Y in the middle — is a misspelled noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in “ready” must be changed to “i” when the suffix N-E-S-S is appended to a word such as “ready”.

I suppose that the hiring standards or quality control at IBM are suffering.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (without the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “readiness” — with the letter I in the middle — 17,700,000 matches
• “readyness” — with the letter Y in the middle — 81,800 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 216-to-1, which is excellent.

Solution:
“Readiness to travel”