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First to be clear this is not a shameless plug for my company, for that reason, I will only use the first word even though the full question should include the 2nd word to provide the better example.

When I came up with my company name using the word "Eutopian", I thought I was just playing with the phonetics of the word "utopian" or using "Sensational Spelling", something I just learned about tonight, from using this site. Since it was used to represent a name for my company, I wanted something that would be easy to remember based on the misspelling, or possibly "Satiric misspelling" because I thought that I could also represent the name with a play on the misspelling since my company is 90% an online retail company aka an E-commerce company.

I actually did a search on Google, which lead me to a link to this site where someone actually burst by bubble and explained that according to the Oxford Dictionary, "eutopian" is not spelled incorrectly at all and is defined in that dictionary, which is very strange because while I verified the entry, every search engine (especially Google) is constantly asking me if I meant "Utopian" and if I ask Google to use it's dictionary to define "eutopian" it spits out "No definitions found. Search the web."

Then all of a sudden everyone says the definition is in their dictionary, but it's still trying to suggest I am spelling "utopia" or "utopian" and if I want to search that term instead.

So I guess my question is this: what would you call (if anything) a word which spelling was altered for phonetic / marketing reasons, only to find out that the word is not misspelled, yet 98% of the world insists it is, and even Google (in whatever resource they use for their Dictionary) states it's not a defined word.

Does my question actually make sense? I guess a follow up would be how can I get Google to recognize the spelling of Eutopian since I guess technically it is actually spelled correctly? Thanks!

Sample sentence for single word request: The name of my company is a < insert word >

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    I think this question could (and should) be pared down a lot. The first two paragraphs can probably be rewritten as a single sentence. Also, SEO is not on topic here, so the last paragraph can also be removed.
    – Laurel ♦
    Commented Mar 17, 2018 at 3:19
  • Now that Laurel helped me to see what you're asking, I'd call it "not looking in the right dictionary."
    – KarlG
    Commented Mar 17, 2018 at 3:23
  • Thus far, I greatly appreciate the comments, as for the spelling of the name being different, sadly that was a condition of poor proofreading. I removed the statement about the advertising as the question was not about SEO, it was a legitimate question. Since the spelling of the word is correct, and the most commonly used search engine has tools that insist the word is not spelled correctly, is there a way to address that. Perhaps the humor was not appreciated, but the question remains the same. Thank you!
    – Dardwizzle
    Commented Mar 17, 2018 at 3:43
  • It seems to me that the noun you are looking for is "mistake" and the adjective "mistaken". The fact that the uncovering of the mistake is surprising to you is not relevant to the word itself.
    – Greybeard
    Commented Sep 27, 2020 at 8:43

1 Answer 1

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I know of no single word for an obsolete (or rare, or alternative) spelling.

Eutopia does turn up, however (Eutopian would be the form as an adjective). It is sometimes helpful in searching to put odd spellings in quotation marks.

eutopia

noun, Obsolete. 1. a place in which human society, natural conditions, etc., are so ideally perfect that there is complete contentment.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/eutopia

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