Cupertino effect

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The Cupertino effect is the tendency of spellcheckers to replace a misspelling with a completely inappropriate word.

The origin of the term is that the spelling "cooperation" (also spelled "co-operation") was often changed to Cupertino, for example by older versions of Microsoft Word. This may be because this town hosts the headquarters of Apple Inc., and would be a commonly misspelled word. Users sometimes clicked "Change All" without checking whether the spellchecker's first suggestion was correct to begin with, resulting in even official documents with phrases like "as well as valuable experience in international Cupertino"^[1] and "and reinforcing bilateral and multinational Cupertino and assistance actions."^[2] Other examples include "South Asian Association for Regional Cupertino" and "presentation on African-German Cupertino"^[3]

Cupertino Effect is then more generally applied to any failure to check that the suggested word is appropriate. A common case is "definately"["definitely"] being changed to "defiantly". Benjamin Zimmer of the University of Pennsylvania has collected many examples of similar errors, including DeMeco Ryans as "Demerol" (in the New York Times), Voldemort as "Voltmeter" (in the Denver Post) and the Muttahida Quami movement as "Muttonhead Quail".^[4]

More sophisticated techniques for spell-checking mean that the effect is much less of a problem than it used to be.

It has been said that the misspelling that produced the Cupertino effect is "cooperatino." A member of the European Union translation service reports that the Cupertino change can happen to the word cooperation if the word processor's custom dictionary only has the hyphenated form co-operation, though one writer thought it unlikely that many dictionaries include Cupertino but not cooperation.^[5]