Quarter of Americans can’t spell Jameson

Americans are having difficulty spelling some of their favourite spirits brands, with almost a quarter struggling to spell Jameson correctly.

The Irish whiskey brand, owned by Irish Distillers, sells over two million cases every year in the US alone, yet a large proportion of its fan base fails to spell the brand correctly.

According to smartphone app Bartrendr, which allows users to share information about bars, Jameson is spelled incorrectly 23% of the time.

The app’s developers tracked 100,000 recent posts to finds the most commonly misspelled brand names by its users.

While Jameson is perhaps one of the simplest brands to spell, the brand tripping up users the most was Jägermeister, which was spelled incorrectly 90% of the time.

However, the misspelling of Jägermeister had nothing to do with the omission of the umlaut, as Bartrendr’s developers did not count accent marks among the mistakes. Instead, the word was often spelled phonetically, with a “y” at the beginning.

Other brands commonly misspelled by the app’s users include Budweiser (42%), Hennessy (15%) and Jack Daniel’s (6%).

On the other hand, more complex names of niche brands such as Bruichladdich and Laphroaig were very rarely misspelled, which app co-founder Devon Bergman claimed is down to the users’ more in-depth knowledge of the brands.